Permissiveness: A Beautiful Idea That Didn’t Work

At the Theraplay Institute in Chicago, a small child from a “permissive” home was gently but firmly admonished by an adult for misbehaving. The youngster soberly conceded the point without a whimper – and her parents, watching behind a one-way window from the next room, were amazed. “I can’t believe it,” the father said, shaking his head. “My kid is learning to behave without kicking and screaming in the process.”

It was a typical session at the institute, which is teaching about 400 children a year to overcome the effects of too much permissiveness at home.

A nationwide revival of interest in parental authority and responsibility is only one of many developments that underline the growing worry over the health and future of the American family. Sociologists, psychiatrists and other scholars are warning that a return to stability in national life cannot be achieved without a strong family base. More and more, too, critics are zeroing in on the home – not society at large – as the source of troublesome youngsters.

Parents of juvenile criminals are sometimes finding themselves on the receiving end of multimillion-dollar damage suits brought by the families of the victims. Some communities are experimenting with the idea of holding parents responsible for paying the costs of vandalism committed by their children.

Recently the president of the National Education Association announced that educators are tired of taking the blame for declining achievement in classrooms, when much of the root cause is lack of support and motivation in the home. He said: “We must ask: Why are we seeing more of such students? And what is happening to families and homes in this era of increased mobility and single-parent split homes?”

Alarming statistics reinforce skepticism about the way the American family is functioning. One out of every 6 American children is living with only one or neither parent. Half the mothers of school-age children are in the work force. Between 1990 and 1995, about 41 per cent of all Americans aged 5 and over changed residency, often moving to another neighborhood or city.

Beyond the statistical data are other factors that many see as putting new strains on family solidarity and stability. Among them the intrusion of alien values into the home through television, and - as much as anything else - the rise of a permissive theory of child rearing that became popular in recent decades through the writings of Dr. Benjamin Spock and others. This theory was critical of punishment in any form, or denial of rewards to disobedient children. Parents, instead, were encouraged to discuss problems with their youngsters, relying on persuasion rather than punishment.

Some family and child specialists retain their faith in the “liberated child” philosophy. For instance, Dr. E. Gerald, head of the child and adolescent outpatient clinic at New York Hospital, says young people are “no longer in the dark as they were 50 years ago.” He adds: “They know what goes on. I think they’re great – exciting and stimulating. One of the reasons that adults don’t like them is that they ‘don’t know their place’ as they did 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago.”

Now many family advisers are rushing to downgrade enthusiasm for other popular trends such as raising children in communes or with one parent only.

Dr. Dennis of the outpatient clinic at the University of Chicago Medical School says: “A child needs two loving parents. When one parent is absent, physically or emotionally, the child can develop great difficulties.”

The renewed emphasis on old methods has created many problems for parents attuned to philosophy of the recent past. In some cases, a whole program of re-education has been necessary.

At Chicago’s Theraplay Institute, parents are encouraged to learn from the work of professional therapists. Ann J., director of Theraplay, advocates that children should be raised with definite rules and limits in the household, or they may become confused and unhappy, unable to set controls on themselves. “A family is not a democracy,” she adds. “Children need a time to be babied, a time to be told how to live, and a time to be loved physically before they are ready to behave as adults.”

Her recommendation: that “parents be the meanest mom and dad on the block with rules, and the most loving mom and dad on the block with playful physical activity.”

That advice is echoed by many other counselors and scholars, some of whom condone occasional resort to “paddling” the recalcitrant child when all else fails. Many children, themselves, seem to agree that permissiveness is not the sole culprit in parental shortcomings.

Many parents often are found to be too strict with their children, imposing harsh rules without much thought to a particular youngster’s needs. Power-income parents, harassed by outside pressures, tend to give low priority to time spent playing with their youngsters or simply listening to them.

Nor is a return to authoritative households seen as likely, by itself, to solve the disarray in today’s families.

What is needed, counselors say, are broad-scale adjustments in social and economic institutions to provide support for family stability. As more and more parents place their toddlers in day-care centres or nursery schools, such agencies are being called on to provide foe parental participation on a regular basis to keep each child’s family in the picture. Day-care centres provided by employers for children of working mothers have not taken hold in America as rapidly as in Europe.

Even so, counselors say, children can benefit visibly from visits to the offices or factories where their parents work. Understanding more about their elders’ activities is described as an effective way of bridging the gaps that exist between the generations.

Another major effort involves better preparation of teenagers and young adults for parental responsibilities and children’s needs. One approach: the home and family classes for high-school students, now being offered increasingly by school systems across the country.

Some experts say that help may soon be coming from yet another factor – the tendency of today’s young people to marry and bear children at later ages than in the past. This, the reasoning goes, could produce parents who are more mature and better able to meet the responsibilities of child rearing than their parents were.

Even so, some scholars warn, changes within the family cannot achieve the needed stability and effectiveness in child rearing without support from outside institutions.

In the past, some critics feel, schools, courts and other institutions were all too willing to take on responsibilities once those of the family, as evidenced by the growth of counseling, psychiatric programs and nursery schools.

Now, they believe, the time has come for outside institutions to search for ways to support the family in carrying out its functions, not to take them over. Says Sam L., a youth co-ordinator for the probation court in Pontiac, Mich.: “What we’re seeing is a recognition that the courts, and perhaps the schools, have accepted a lot more responsibility for raising youngsters that they should have. Now we’re moving back from that.”

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1027