A Child's Christmas in America

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It is a time of crime by and toward juveniles, when the battered child has risen from incident to epidemic. It is a time when the behavioral pendulum is swinging uncertainly from permissiveness toward discipline. It is a time when the mere mention of Watergate brings unaccustomed cynicism to schoolyard conversations. It is a time when children are being warned against the ecological dangers of having children of their own when they grow up, when they are hearing almost as much about ZPG as about ABC.

Not long ago Columnist Art Buchwald wrote humorously of a day when a poll would show that 67% of all adults over 30 years of age "said they would rather have a good time than have children." Something like that may be happening. For whatever reasons, personal, political, economic (it costs $34,500 to support a middle-class child to college age), the birth rate has fallen to the lowest level in U.S. history. In one year, from 1971 to 1972, the number of live births declined by 9%, to 15.6 per 1,000 population. This year it dropped to 15.1. Childless couples, customarily quiet about their choice, now proudly call themselves "child free" and are the subject of interviews. "I don't see many children who want to be with their parents more than a dutiful hour or two," one child-free mother explained.

Many fathers and mothers today see themselves more as individuals and less as just parents, according to Detroit Psychoanalyst Peter Martin. And says Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: "The growing number of divorces is now accompanied by a new phenomenon: the unwillingness of either parent to take custody of the child." All this suggests that the U.S. is beginning to be less child centered than it used to be.

But the American child is still the focus of attention for armies of psychologists as well as teachers and parents. At Christmas, 1973, these are some of the forces they see affecting the American child:

WORKING MOTHERS. According to Psychologist Kenneth Keniston, the most recent dramatic event in the history of the American family is the entrance of large numbers of women into the work force. Almost half the mothers in the U.S. now work outside the home (one in every three mothers with children under six). Meanwhile, the number of live-in relatives who could care for the children has drastically decreased, while the cost of baby sitters and nurses has soared. Thus the new emphasis on proliferating day-care centers, good, bad and mediocre.

Ironically, the exodus of mothers from the home coincides with a spate of new studies on the importance of the first few months and years of childhood. The most important of these is an unfinished trilogy by British Psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who has devoted most of his life and over 800 pages to demonstrating the need for little children to have a consistent mother figure. "Formerly, adolescence was thought to be the most critical age; the very early years are now being recognized as such," says Jane Judge, director of Sarah Lawrence College's Early Childhood Center. Can day-care centers serve babies well? The debate rages. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock tends to think not. Dr. Virginia Pomeranz, a Manhattan baby doctor, thinks so. "I haven't noticed any ill effects whatsoever except for an increase in the number of colds they catch."