Safeguarding Cyborg Childhood - Essay Example

? and Number] John Demos’ discussion of the changes the American family has undergonefrom the Colonial period to the present day John Putnam Demos is an American historian and author. He wrote about the evolution of American families over time among other things. Family is very much a social aspect and construct, and family history takes a great variety of relationships into account; the relatives, the children, the society, the laws, the economic conditions and so on. And understanding the intricate relationships in a familial situation is difficult and complicated (Past, Present and Personal 1986). Demos believed the colonial era was one of gender equality as there was no distinction between work activities and home activities as well the production and reproduction function, and mothers had a better status then than they have today. Fathers in the household were more involved and interacted in their homes a great deal more and felt it uncanny if they didn’t and even though they were the head of the family, those unequal feelings and matters between genders didn’t exist. Later on, these patterns were to change (Demos 1999). Also, before the twentieth century, the concept of children and childhood didn’t exist in America. Children were important and have gained great importance over the years, now that they have started to influence decisions in the household due to their pester power, however before they were considered this important, they weren’t even regarded as children essentially. They were to act and behave like adults and have responsibilities like adults because their importance in society was equated from their worth in their household in economic and financial terms. This was a sort of world where children were dictated and not treated as children; they were in fact forced to be adults, a concept known as ‘authoritarian childbearing.’ Later it was realized that children also have needs, and these needs are not similar to our needs and they had different kind of personalities as well so not all children were the same, just like all adults weren’t. Children therefore were stuff, and almost mirror reflections in terms of behavior of their mother and father as they had to proper and fill in the roles of adults at a very early age. Disciplining the child was essential and they had to be shaped and maneuvered so that they exhibited no qualities of a child that we see today. The Puritans during Colonial times believed that the child was no good, and all his childish urges had to be pressed down so that they didn’t rise to the surface and cause any harm. Demos believed that even though this habit was practiced, he didn’t believe in it. He believed that such a repressive behavior would result in crippling the child’s growth, leaving him unable to have confidence in him or herself, and always feeling like something bestowed on the planet that was worthless and shameful to all (Demos 1999). The clothing and playing activities were also different in a household. Children didn’t indulge in much playing and recreation due to the fact their clothes wouldn’t allow them to do so. Clothes were what were viewed as wealth in the colonial times, and people who were wealthy had plenty of them as a result. Children as well were subjected to wearing heavy clothing which was fitted at their torso and similar to their parents; they also wore skirts, both male and female, and this was irksome because one couldn’t tell the gender difference very often. This today would be seen as emasculation. Skirts also showed that people were dependant on someone. Wives and little children were assumed to be dependent on their husbands and fathers and this skirt wearing depicted so. Children also died a great deal; there were many diseases like chickenpox around, and no medicinal facilities and parents lost children every day and suffered grief and loss. And families perhaps had the intention of educating their children, but there were no schools as such, just ideas in the Colonial era. 18th century led to changing needs of the household as schools came into being and kids had to be able to read according to the Puritans (Demos 1999). In the transition to the nineteenth century, children weren’t ashamed of themselves, but they felt guilty, because any misdemeanor by a child would lead to an extremely discouraging response by a parent; some even indulged in child labor. But this depended on the type of family one belonged to, mostly farmer’s kids were pulled out of school to focus on work and make their family’s ends meet. People actually thought that child labor was a good thing, even as they moved away from working with their families to produce a product to working in machines as they developed. All these changes depict what was happening in the family internally and the family as seen as part of society and their relationship with society. The government also intervened a great deal in family life and households, determining at times who the head of the house should be, something that would be extremely unacceptable and actually an invasion of privacy today. And households were a sort of a “welfare institution” since they served many different functions; sometimes taking in their elder parents and grandparents who could no longer fend for themselves, incorporating an orphan child in their home, becoming a hospital when someone was sick and so on. As far as discipline was concerned, and there was plenty of it in the colonial times, the household was also a place for “reform” because when individuals committed crime or so, they were sentenced to serve households by the court’s orders in some person’s house who upheld an image of a good citizen. The family also assumed the role of a “church,” since prayer and worship and not the actual shrine were considered almost imperative and an overall part of the community function. And the roles just kept on changing within a family. Father who were involved in their household previously had to go to work outside and mother’s roles were changing and becoming unequal as they had to stay in the house and have a greater domestic purpose as well. Men’s contact with their children gradually decreased. The family aspect wasn’t actually giving any real social order, but at least giving a foil. In the twentieth century, the complex of good father to bad father was rampant since the father was almost non-existential in the household due to the power and status he got from the outside world through his work. As divorce rates increased, the law for custody was revisited and women were given custody of their child initially just by being the mother because it was felt necessary for growth. Increasing side effect such as sexual abuse, additional stressors for women in the workplace etc were also seen. Demos also believed that “Family life was wrenched apart from the world of work--a veritable sea change in social history.” Women and men were no fighting for similar roles in the job market and the central roles of family were now ruined, even though the concept of family remained for society and so that complete anarchy wouldn’t ensue. This was the plight of the modern era and industrialization; it tore apart people who were equal and lived in harmony during the colonial period. “Family is important not as much as the foundation for an ideal social order, but as a foil to an actual state of social disorder.” As man went out to work, he liked less, he was more disgruntled ad distressed, and he learned different values. He learned to not be himself at most times because the world didn’t need to see that. But according to Demos, home had the soft feelings attached to it such as comfort developed in the Colonial times and man had to sometimes bury his head in that home as a safe haven so that he could escape the anarchy of the world for a while, so that he didn’t break down and returned to his chaotic life revived in his home. Family life is personal and protective. And even as it was believed that the central role of the family was breaking, it was impossible to do so. So the social function of a family seemed to be shrinking where as the emotional and psychological function was becoming more important. So from the colonial times to the modern times or the present day, the roles of the typical American family have changed drastically; from being a power unit where everybody was well connected and played an equal role in the household with essentially no children, they evolved to a modern era of a working population, where women work as well however they are still not on an equal level, and they have a great deal of other functions as well. So even though the past had its mistakes, I do agree with Demos that the present has brought about a state of mind that is always stressed and pressurized, and therefore, the home still has that emotion attached to it like home sweet home, that it is one place that one wants to fall back on when the world is going berserk, no matter what stake of evolution an American family is in. Further change is anticipated of course, as the technological age further dehumanizes a person and forces him to rely on machines and the outside world than family values (The unredeemed captive 1994). Bibliography Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth:. Oxford University Press, 1999. Past, present, and personal : the family and the life course in American history. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. The unredeemed captive : a family story from early America. Random House, Inc., 1994. Read More