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some of the current growth in single-parent families is offset by a decline in the number
of children raised in institutions, in foster homes, or by relatives. This fact does not di-
minish the stresses of divorce and other serious family problems of today, but it does help
correct the tendency to contrast the terrible Present with an idealized Past.
Today s children rarely experience the death of a close relative, except for elderly
grandparents. And it is possible to grow into adulthood without experiencing even that
loss.  We never had any deaths in my family, a friend recently told me, explaining that
none of her relatives had died until she was in her twenties. In earlier times, children were
made aware of the constant possibility of death, attended deathbed scenes, and were even
encouraged to examine the decaying corpses of family members.
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Chapter 1 " Families Past and Present 33
One psychological result of our escape from the daily presence of death is that we
are ill prepared for it when it comes. For most of us, the first time we feel a heightened
concern with our own mortality is in our thirties and forties when we realize that the
years we have already lived outnumber those we have left.
Another result is that the death of a child is no longer a sad but normal hazard of
parenthood. Rather, it has become a devastating, life-shattering loss from which a parent
may never fully recover. The intense emotional bonding between parents and infants that
we see as a sociobiological given did not become the norm until the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. The privileged classes created the concept of the  emotionally price-
less child, a powerful ideal that gradually filtered down through the rest of society.
The high infant mortality rates of premodern times were partly due to neglect,
and often to lethal child-rearing practices such as sending infants off to a wet nurse* or,
worse, infanticide. It now appears that in all societies lacking reliable contraception, the
careless treatment and neglect of unwanted children acted as a major form of birth con-
trol. This does not necessarily imply that parents were uncaring toward all their children;
rather, they seem to have practiced  selective neglect of sickly infants in favor of sturdy
ones, or of later children in favor of earlier ones. In 1801 a writer observed of Bavarian
peasants:
The peasant has joy when his wife brings forth the first fruit of their love, he has joy with
the second and third as well, but not with the fourth. . . . He sees all children coming
thereafter as hostile creatures, which take the bread from his mouth and the mouths of his
family. Even the heart of the most gentle mother becomes cold with the birth of the fifth
child, and the sixth, she unashamedly wishes death, that the child should pass to heaven.
Declining fertility rates are another major result of falling death rates. Until the
baby boom of the 1940s and 1950s, fertility rates had been dropping continuously since
the eighteenth century. By taking away parents fear that some of their children would
not survive to adulthood, lowered early-childhood mortality rates encouraged careful
planning of births and smaller families. The combination of longer lives and fewer, more
closely spaced children created a still-lengthening empty-nest stage in the family. This
* Wet-nursing the breastfeeding of an infant by a woman other than the mother was widely practiced in
pre-modern Europe and colonial America. Writing of a two-thousand-year-old  war of the breast, the devel-
opmental psychologist William Kessen notes that the most persistent theme in the history of childhood is the
reluctance of mothers to suckle their babies, and the urgings of philosophers and physicians that they do so.
Infants were typically sent away from home for a year and a half or two years to be raised by poor country
women, in squalid conditions. When they took in more babies than they had milk enough to suckle, the babies
would die of malnutrition.
The reluctance to breast-feed may not have reflected maternal indifference so much as other demands
in premodern, precontraceptive times the need to take part in the family economy, the unwillingness of
husbands to abstain from sex for a year and a half or two. ( Her milk would dry up if a mother became pregnant.)
Although in France and elsewhere the custom persisted into the twentieth century, large-scale wet-nursing
symbolizes the gulf between modern and premodern sensibilities about infants and their care.
The anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes describes how impoverished mothers in northeastern Brazil se-
lect which infants to nurture.
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34 Part I " The Changing Family
in turn has encouraged the companionate style of marriage, since husband and wife can
expect to live together for many years after their children have moved out.
Many demographers have suggested that falling mortality rates are directly linked
to rising divorce rates. In 1891 W. F. Willcox of Cornell University made one of the most
accurate social science predictions ever. Looking at the high and steadily rising divorce
rates of the time, along with falling mortality rates, he predicted that around 1980, the
two curves would cross and the number of marriages ended by divorce would equal
those ended by death. In the late 1970s, it all happened as Willcox had predicted. Then
divorce rates continued to increase before leveling off in the 1980s, while mortality rates
continued to decline. As a result, a couple marrying today is more likely to celebrate a
fortieth wedding anniversary than were couples around the turn of the century.
In statistical terms, then, it looks as if divorce has restored a level of instability to
marriage that had existed earlier due to the high mortality rate. But as Lawrence Stone
observes,  it would be rash to claim that the psychological effects of the termination of
marriage by divorce, that is by an act of will, bear a close resemblance to its termination
by the inexorable accident of death.
THE NEW STAGES OF LIFE
In recent years it has become clear that the stages of life we usually think of as built
into human development are, to a large degree, social and cultural inventions. Although
people everywhere may pass through infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age, the facts
of nature are  doctored, as Ruth Benedict once put it, in different ways by different
cultures.
The Favorite Age
In 1962 Phillipe Ariès made the startling claim that  in medieval society, the idea of
childhood did not exist. Ariès argued not that parents then neglected their children,
but that they did not think of children as having a special nature that required spe-
cial treatment; after the age of around five to seven, children simply joined the adult
world of work and play. This  small adult conception of childhood has been observed
by many anthropologists in preindustrial societies. In Europe, according to Ariès and
others, childhood was discovered, or invented, in the seventeenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, with the emergence of the private, domestic, companionate family and formal
schooling. These institutions created distinct roles for children, enabling childhood to
emerge as a distinct stage of life. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]