Let us proceed as if childhood is reclaimable, in some form

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century . Postman continues his almost apocalyptic view of what is happening to our children in the Information Age. Unfortunately his hypothesis has a lot of supporting evidence and I am afraid he is on to something.

Let us proceed as if childhood is reclaimable, in some form. How can we give it a voice? There are three institutions that have a serious interest in the question: the family, the school, and government.

As for the first, it is as obvious as it is depressing that the structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young. Margaret Mead once referred to television, for example, as the second parent, by which she meant that our children literally spend more time with television than with their fathers. In such terms, fathers may be the fifth or sixth parent, trailing behind television, the Internet, CDs, radio, and movies. . . . In any case, it is quite clear that the media have diminished the role of the family in shaping the values and sensibilities of the young.

Moreover, and possibly as a result of the enlarged sovereignty of the media, many parents have lost confidence in their ability to raise children because they believe that the information and instincts they have about child rearing are unreliable. As a consequence, they not only do not resist media influence, they turn to experts who are presumed to know what is best for children. Thus, psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors, teachers, and others representing an institutional point of view invade large areas of parental authority, mostly by invitation. What this means is that there is a loss in the intimacy, dependence, and loyalty that traditionally characterize the parent-child relationship. Indeed, it is now believed by some that the parent-child relationship is essentially neurotic, and that children are better served by institutions than by families.

An effective response to all of this poses difficulties and is not without a price to pay. If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture. This is especially the case in America. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of the throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also almost un-American to remain in close proximity t one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control e media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly, in the short run, the children who grew up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will be able to keep alive a humane tradition, It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it has children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service for themselves and their children.