The American Child
"The American child has a bad reputation abroad. It was Max O’Fell, I believe, who wondered how it was possible that such little demons as the American children became such…
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“The American Child,” from Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
Nothing illustrates better the way America takes hold of a national fault and tries to remedy it than the remodelling of the type of child among our prosperous classes. A foreigner, asked off-hand to give an example of an imp, will reply unhesitatingly, “An American child aged between two and fourteen years”; and in many hotels on the Continent there is a standing rule never to admit American children. A careful look-out is kept, and if a family of American tourists accompanied by children presents itself, they are respectfully directed elsewhere.
The American child has a bad reputation abroad. It was Max O’Fell, I believe, who wondered how it was possible that such little demons as the American children became such passable men and women. It used to be hard work to convince the visitor to the United States that the majority of these little demons, tearing about the city streets, playing in “front yards” without a vestige of fence or hedge, and of vast discomfort indoors to everyone except their parents, to whom they were a source of unrestrained satisfaction, did not end in prison, were not kidnapped nor molested, and did, in fact, turn out well.
I shall never forget the momentary look of horror that swept an Englishman’s face when the six-years’ old son of his American host, to whom he was extending an invitation, jumped up and down, and, pulling his father’s coat, demanded shrilly, “Make him say when, dad! make him say when!" or the near approach to collapse of a titled English woman, when the young hopeful of an American household interrupted dinner-table conversation to ask,"How it is, being from England, you don’t drop your aitches?"
But this type of American child is happily changing. Someone has said that St. George was particularly fortunate in the moment when he had his picture taken. And the American child has been most unfortunate in this direction, for in America’s rebound from the days when life was “more wrestling than dancing,” child-culture was a negligible detail. The child, as art expression of the country, was a wild product, a "self-raiser,” as they say of patent flour, and emotionally surcharged with the rest of the nation, it presented an independence, an aggression and a strident voice calculated to upset the comfort of a whole dining-room or car or steamship. It was at that period that the mental kodaks focussed upon him and snapped.
Now, however, the bringing up of children in America has become a study. Their manners if not remedied, are at least modified; their vivacity put under some control, their voices trained. They are not allowed to eat indigestible food at late hours, and, generally speaking, an intense desire for improvement has been applied to motherhood, nursery, and schools.
Of course the American child will always be precocious, though not in a bookish sense. An American boy, who was sent to one of the large Public Schools in England, was deeply impressed with the fact that English boys are much hotter students. "They act sort of girlish, but they can take Euclid by the back of the neck and shake the change out of his pockets, you bet!” he vigorously voiced the distinction.
The American child has a sense of a complete identification with the social group of his environment as the adult has. He develops an alert feeling of security in the midst of life about him, as if he were sitting at the theatre or “at a party,” with the performance for his benefit. Recently, at a political gathering in a Western State where the suffrage has been given to women, a small boy insisted upon joining in the discussion. The child was interrupted, and told that he had no right to, vote, so he might as well keep still. “I don’t care,” replied the young orator, “my mother can vote, so can my sister, and she influences her husband!”
The main cause of the sophistication of the American child lies in the fact that the sidewalks (pavements) are his playground. It is amusing, after reading some incontrovertibly statistical article on the decline of the birthrate, to walk, or to try to make a continuous progress along a residence street in any large American city, for you are surrounded by a continual swirl of children, as if some orphanage or school were having a fire-drill in each square. They dodge about you as a post in chasing each other; you have to circumnavigate games of hop-scotch and jack-stones, until it seems as if Uncle Sam’s miscalculations must be solely because of his inability to count his children.
Not long ago a revival of the roller-skating craze filled the streets with hordes of rushing, screaming, catapulting youngsters on wheels. Some citizens, needless to say childless, in one of our large cities, appealed to the authorities for protection of life and limb, but were promptly notified that the streets were the American child’s playground and they must “dodge” about as intruders; and I have seen traffic on a busy street held up more effectively than the police could have achieved, while a bunch, of little girls, well dressed and evidently from comfortable homes, clattered across the car-tracks and drive-way on their roller skates.
At the recent historical celebration in New York, the public despotism of American childhood was nobly illustrated. There was a day given over to school children’s parade and festivities, and about 500,000 took part. After the parade, there were some tableaux given in one of the parks by only a few of the children; but all the other mites were determined to see their comrades perform, and the space about the young actors grew smaller and smaller as the little ones edged up.
The marshals sat down in a ring and tried to hold them back, but the children simply walked over them. Then the police lieutenant and his men tried to handle that juvenile crowd by waving their arms, but those little ones would not be “shooed.” They had come there to see, and see they would. They were American children. They wriggled between the legs of the big policemen, who grabbed at them hopelessly. Finally, the police were lost in the depths of the children about them, and folded their arms in despair. I am told that certain citizens, who had been prevented from getting through the lines at the two big parades of that celebration, rolled on the grass in pure joy over the victory of the children.
Yet in their homes to-day, the American children of well-to-do parents—children whose mothers are American gentlewomen, and whose fathers are prosperous business and professional men—are gentle mannered, perfectly obedient, outwardly civil, quick to take a hint, and not at all disagreeable companions. It is well, since the child is so much in evidence in the household, that he is interesting; and the American child is interesting, very well read in modern literature, up on the topics of the day (American children are allowed to read the newspapers as regularly as their fathers), and very mature in his point of view, through his continual presence in the elders' family circle.
Not having, except in wealthy families, any room, either day or night nursery, that they can call their own, they roam the house at will, and it is a temptation to parody the American poet who wrote of “The Children's Hour,” when everyone realizes that in the usual American menage, it is twenty-four a day to their account. But it is the exception where the little girls do not curtsey in taking your hand, and the average boy in such a home appears more like the shy English boy on first presentation.
I think I am conservative in saying that the “terribly interruptious” boy, as my English friend puts it, is fast disappearing. The American boy is still more of the starlet gamin in his lack of polish and use of street vernacular than the well brought-up English boy; but this is attributable to his liberty to rove about the streets, selecting his companions at haphazard, not being sent away to school as the English boy to have manners put in with the same drill as are algebra and Latin and his companionship circumscribed within his own class.
The American boy either does not raise his cap to his elders as the English boy does so charmingly, or he does so in a sheepish way with a wary look-out for a chum who shall taunt him with being a “sissy” or a “softy,” but the American boy has instilled in him in his home a chivalrous attitude toward his sisters and other little girls. He is, in fact, tyrannized over by these selfish little maids to an extent which led one observing Englishman to see in the “giving in” demanded of the average male child the beginning of the so-called slavery of the American man to the American woman. And it has its humorous aspects.
I remember once coming upon a small boy and his sister, when the young lady, for some slight offence, had precipitated herself upon the male offender, and was doing considerable damage to his countenance. The youngster made no resistance beyond spreading wide his arms as a martyr and calling, “Oh, do take her off! Do take her off! I can’t hit her, you know.” And the general attitude is expressed by another youngster who said, when a girl playmate claimed a beloved mechanical toy, “Oh, well, take it. I ’spose you’ve got to have everything ’cause you’re the lady.”
The American parent encourages this attitude in the belief that it makes for gallantry and courtesy to women; and a good word should be said for the continual contact of parents and children in America. If the American boy is kept at home long after the English custom would have him under the hardening regimen, in one of the large schools, the American child gets his physical discipline in his rough-and-tumble experience on the streets, and to a believer in a parent’s interest above the best paid guardianship in the world, it would seem that, in the absolute devotion of American parents, something might be supplied to the child life in the home that no amount of theory and well-regulated esteem bestowed by boarding-schools touches.
This intimacy of children with their parents may make for a want of deference toward the father later on, and conduce to the attitude “it’s only mother” of the selfish American child as it accepts sacrifices as the air it breathes; but home life among the middle class in the United States, if not strong in theory, is a national feature for which I think we need not blush.
In the average household, the whole family gather about a table in the evening, and the children prepare their lessons for the next day with assistance from either parent. There is a story read aloud before bed-time, and the mother superintends the baths, and always “tucks in” the bed covers about her youngsters, hears their prayers, and turns out the light, until they are big boys and girls. To be sure, when there are visitors, this regime being upset, the children sit about and listen to the conversation of their elders, which assuredly is not pleasant for the visitors. However, visiting is not a national system in America.
Of course, Americans generally believe that the English parent misses much in the restraint from the tender yearnings over the child in its baby days, while I have heard English mothers refer to the American emotionalism over their infants as the indulgence of primitive instinct. Leaving that controversy for the doctrinaires, I yet am willing to confess that, later on in the child's life, I do most heartily approve of the attitude of the English parent to this extent: when the English parent takes the child into companionship, the parent enters into the spirit of youth most enthusiastically and sympathetically.
The parent becomes the child instead of, as in America, the child adopting other ways of his elders. Few American mothers would consider their dignity proof against a game of tennis or a romp with their children; yet in the tea-time frolic in English homes I have seen mothers of glacial dignity ordinarily make splendid bears to crawl and growl after fat little, legs, and the English father in a game of cricket with his boys is part of the holiday programme whenever possible.
There may be much truth in the charge that American mothers are too nervous to make the best companions for their children, and that American fathers are strangely weak and invertebrate in their relation to their children, but the troops of American boys and girls on their way to school every morning are rather noticeable for good physique, and give no evidence of being over-indulged. There are few spindle legs, and, while quite a proportion wear spectacles, it is because both schools and parents watch for the slightest deficiency and make every effort to correct it.
Among the smaller children from the waist up it is hard to tell the sex; the little girls wearing the regulation sailor blouse—chevron on sleeve, bo’s’n whistlecord and all, called the “Peter Thompson," after the crippled sailor who began the manufacture of seaman's costume for little folks in America years ago. The little girl's dress terminates in a kilted skirt in place of brother's trousers, but both little boys and girls wear the hair bobbed, or “Dutch" style, and a tam-o'-shanter, cloth sailor cap, or, in winter, a knit “stocking-cap" pulled down over the ears and tassel dangling brownie-wise, completes the costume which is so universal as to be almost uniform for school equipment.
Girls’ coats are now cut on the lines of the brothers’, if not purchased from the boys’ department in the shops. Half hose are worn by children up to eight and ten years in the warm season, but the movement to continue them through the winter to harden the little legs has never grown popular. On the other hand, the stiff leggings which were worn in the days when American boys had their manhood demeaned with wide ruffled collars and velvet monkey jackets over white lawn blouses, in the era of long curls, have passed, and from the cloth or linen sailor suits he is promoted to the Norfolk suit with close, manlike, or Eton style linen collar.
The boy dressed like the picturesque hero of a maudlin child’s story, and the little girl dressed like a Christmas-tree fairy of many skirts and ruffles—the two pictures of American children in foreign minds—are exceedingly rare in the United States to-day. Even among the very wealthy the sable and ermine cloaks of the little girls cover exquisite hand-embroidered but severely plain frocks and skirts—even the elaborate French bonnets, at one time such a prominent feature in the outfit of these little dollar princesses, are replaced now by fur and dark velvet hats with ear laps—while little gold-spoon boys wear clothing made by their father’s tailor, and as uncompromising in lines as the man’s. Plainness, in the children’s clothing marks a noteworthy step in America’s conversion to regard the child as a study of species, not merely an emotional luxury.
With child culture developing suddenly as a wide popular movement, it was only natural that it should take on something of shallowness, and this is demonstrated in the case of the American infant and the diversions of American children.
First the infant. The young mother in America is possessed of a love-madness for her tiny infant, to an extent I never found in other countries, and which, while it is very poetical and picturesque, is harmful in many ways. The majority of American women nurse their babies, or make every effort to do so, only adopting artificial feeding or a wet nurse as a last resort. But as the mother is generally nervous, and her strength drained in many other avenues of household and social duties, the child cannot flourish. It means a vast expenditure of vitality with the reward of a fretful, exacting American baby, that grows into childhood simply because “God is good and the race is strong.”
Whatever may be the defects of the foster-mother system abroad or, later, of the nursery governess, the American baby, subject to the passionate instincts of alternating love, tears, pride, and frantic despair, which sway the emotional mother in its care, is not to be envied. Our national curse of no servants cannot be accepted as the cause of this obsession of the American mother with the belief that in infancy her constant and unremitting effort for her child is necessary. It is a curious fact that the American mother gives, in the love for her baby, full sway to the emotion and demonstration of affection she withholds from her husband.
The husband and the other children are always “hushed” when there is a baby in the house; and the American father whose inclination is to shed all family responsibility except monetary support, is brought to domestic earth when there is a baby, and he is not allowed to feel himself above walking the floor with the infant nor pushing the perambulator.
The other children do not have the baby strapped to their back as Japanese little girls are saddled, but there are “little mothers” in the middle and upper middle classes, as well as among the poor in America. One cannot enter an American home where a baby reigns without wishing that there could be less heart and more mind in the attitude of the average American mother toward her new-born. Of course there are a growing number of households where the baby is put into a nursery with a good nurse, fed punctually at stated periods, cries little, and sleeps well—an unobtrusive addition to the household riches.
There are even a limited number where modernized Spartan methods are adopted—the baby sleeping even at night on a porch and going without food, covering, or the orthodox flannel next to the skin—and then there is the Southern baby, who is still the special charge of some old coloured “mammie,” who keeps it covered, downy head and all, for a month, and then gives it a “sugar plum ”—a combination of sugar, cracker crumbs, and a raisin tied in a piece of cambric — as a “pacifier.” I have picked up the daintiest of babies, the child of a noted Southern beauty, and found a strong smell of its “mammie's” corn-cob pipe about it; but its mother was only amused at my remonstrance, declaring placidly that no one in the world knew how to care for a child like an old Virginia “mammie.”
But the average American baby is cared for in abject worship by its mother, and the household is turned topsy-turvy for the benefit of this smallest member. “The doctor brought the baby in a bottle,” the other children are told, and on this score, rather than because of any personal grudge for powder or pill ministration, is many a family physician cordially hated and glared at on his visits from behind doors and stairway fastnesses by small rebellious spirits. .
The American mother shudders over the “paid motherhood” given the babies of France and Germany; but I think, on the other hand, Continental mothers would be astounded at the way the American child between four and eleven years is turned upon the street playground like a young colt to pasture, for a nurse guardianship after a child is five years old is almost an unheard-of thing with the middle and even well-to-do classes.
As a result of this independence, the American youngster develops an alertness and resourcefulness that makes the children of other nations seem intellectually asleep. The American thinks that is what the foreigner construes as pertness in his children. An Englishman stood watching some children feeding the squirrels that scamper about many of the parks in American cities. The squirrels were tame enough to try to steal from unguarded bags of nuts, and the children were luring them with empty hands. Other children were about in groups, engaged in the noisy, excitable, ingenious games of strategy and manoeuvre which American children always play. The Englishman surveyed the whole scene: “Very American, those squirrels,” he finally said, “really very like your, children—not too many scruples, and plenty of cleverness.”
One spring day I heard a small voice at my front door ask of the maid: "Please may I come in and soap my legs?” Mistrusting my ears, I investigated, and found it to be the six-year-old daughter of a friend, and I had not misunderstood. She had started for Sunday school, and found to her dismay that her half hose had a persistent tendency toward her low shoes, because, as she explained most earnestly, "They will not stick unless you soap your legs.” Very solemnly the maid produced a moistened cake of laundry soap, and there, on the floor of my drawing-room, that infant anointed her chubby limbs, adjusted her socks with a satisfied pat, and, thanking me, started serious and trim for her spiritual instruction. It was merely typical of an American child’s ingenuity.
Busbey, Katherine Graves. Home Life in America. MacMillan Co., 1915.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
