I Do Want To Grow Up

Second star to the right...

The recent closing due to bankruptcy of the well-loved Toys R Us chain has caused all manner of moaning and wailing from former Toys R Us Kids in my generation. The catchy jingle that none of us could ever forget has become almost a mantra for those of us reluctantly dealing with the responsibilities of adulthood. I can’t claim to have mastered them, myself, but I often reflect on just how ill-prepared my generation seems to be for those responsibilities. We have an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia for our childhoods, which we idealise and idolise, but we also have an unhealthy fear of maturity. I suppose it is hard to get excited about paying bills and making appointments and buying groceries and cleaning toilets…but there used to be a sense of achievement and pride associated with these things that has gotten lost somewhere. Rudyard Kipling writes about the impressive feat that is achieved in becoming "a Man, my son!" Maya Angelou celebrates her own "inner mystery" as a Phenomenal Woman. Robert Hayden describes his father thanklessly performing "love's austere and lonely offices" for an indifferent child. Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Bennet's best friend in Pride and Prejudice) speaks of the importance having her own house, and the independence as well as security she derives from it. Lizzie, herself, even acknowledges that “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”

Young people today do not eagerly anticipate adulthood, though they may be impatient for some of its privileges. It is de rigueur to espouse admiration of children and resistance to growing up, from Dr. Seuss saying that “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them” to Maggie Smith’s Wendy telling Peter Pan’s children that growing up is against her house rules. I think there has been a misinterpretation, though. People say they wish to remain forever young in their hearts, to see the world through childlike eyes, but they mistakenly equate that with childish behaviour. Even worse, they are encouraged in this by the mirror of culture. People are told to feel victimised, to feel helpless, to rage against the circumstances of the world in impotent gestures. Indeed, the infantilisation of the adult population has been developing for decades, but it really took root… when?

SO, WHAT?

I think of Wordsworth and others in the mid-18th century idealising childhood as a time of innocence and purity. Then I think of the Victorian era, when in practice children were tiny adults, seen and not heard, restricted in everything they did, but in literature were often held up as moral paragons and heroes (think of Oliver Twist or of the Alice books). This continued into the 20th century, with the most obvious example being Barrie’s Peter Pan in 1904—a little boy who refused to grow up even as real children continued to dress and act like their parents and sometimes even go to work. This Cult of Childhood was celebratory and exaggerated, but it didn’t give (most) adults the excuse to remain perpetual children. So maybe the change happened later.

Nonsense

During the World Wars everyone had to “put away childish things” in order to survive, so perhaps it was those late 1940s and early '50s parents who restarted the movement with their baby boom. They were experiencing new prosperity and wanted to give their children easier lives than they had had, so they provided them with comfortable homes and modern appliances and plenty of toys, preserving childhood as a carefree and happy Garden of Eden. Like their biblical forbears, when those children reached technical adulthood in the '60s and '70s they suddenly rebelled against everything their parents had stood for, rejecting responsibility and eschewing rules. It was this generation that decided it was better to be friends with their children instead of parents to them, especially because both parents often had to work and neither wanted to be seen as the “disciplinarian” in the short time they could spend with the children.

Perfect parody of a sad situation.

(Actually, I have just stumbled upon an interesting article by Marie Winn in the NY Times that covers a lot of what I am saying here, and goes into even more detail. Winn notes that, "now, the child is enlisted as an accomplice in his own upbringing. And everywhere parents are explicating the texts of themselves, pleading for their children to agree, to forgive, to understand, instead of simply telling them what to do. The child has come to seem a psychological equal.”)

I suspect along with Winn that a lot of this has to do with the breakdown of the traditional family and the traditional role of the woman in society, as well as the rise of Freudian psychology. All this was followed by the flashy 1980s--which made children of us all, dressing adults in neon colours and wild animal prints, celebrating music stars who were overgrown children, themselves--and the '90s and 2000s, which were a time of commercialisation of youth culture, and now here we are in the 2010s with a world full of people who think “adulting” is a word and who want accolades for even trying to do the things they are supposed to do.

Don't get me started on hashtags.

No wonder everyone is offended all the time, because we have nothing demanded of us, no standards to which we might reasonably hold ourselves, so any censure seems to come from nowhere and appears entirely unmerited. We are the overgrown babies of Huxley’s Brave New World, crying for our pleasure reels and our soma, with no way of gaining any perspective from which to understand how wrong we are.

I have been rereading a book called “Good Influence: Teaching the Wisdom of Adulthood” by Daniel R. Heischman in preparation for returning to teaching. It was given to me during the penultimate year of my first teaching position at Doane Academy in NJ, and it makes some really salient points about the importance of adults acting like adults when they are around children (as parents or teachers or coaches). He identifies quite pointedly what I think is the source of the Peter Pan syndrome rampant amongst adults these days: a lack of confidence.

Heischman's cover

“In a world of competing truth claims," he writes, "how can we parents and teachers be certain that what we believe is worth seeking to impress upon young people? ‘Who am I,’ the adult asks, ‘to think I can impose my beliefs onto my children or my students? Will they even listen to what I might say?’ Indeed, I am convinced that a part of the desire some parents have had in recent decades to allow their son or daughter to choose their own values as they grow is a way to sidestep the ambivalence they themselves might feel about the quality and enduring value of their own convictions” (25).

I admit suffering from this lack of assurance, myself, in certain areas. Now that I am teaching again, I sense returning upon me the indignation I always feel when students are being rude (ignoring instructions, playing on their phones, chewing gum in class, talking over each other). I have been even more horrified to observe the supposed adults acting the same way—ignoring the speaker at an assembly, talking over the opening address, scrolling through Instagram instead of paying attention. It has been suggested to me that this is a cultural difference; that Colombians are talkative by nature and must be forgiven, but I find that a weak excuse. The rules of polite behaviour are not something I question. But there are larger philosophical questions raised in faculty meetings like, “should we assign homework?” and “can we take points off of academic grades because of poor behaviour?” that deal with some more complex issues and can make me question whether the way I did things is indeed the only (or the best) way to do things.

And yet…and yet…I remain convinced that my students need and will seek out structure; that they require models of integrity, authority, wisdom, and judgment (yes, that dirty word); and that they need to see the differences between them and us, if only to have something to define themselves against. I may be on a one-woman mission, but I am going to do my best to honour this obligation to them.

So that they may grow up, I will be a grown-up.