"Somebody--Let It, Please God, Be Somebody"

"We like to think of America as a child-oriented society, but our actions belie our words. The actual patterns of life in America today are such that children and families come last," asserted one of the task force reports at last week's White House Conference on Children. The chairman of this task force is Urie Bronfenbrenner, noted Cornell psychologist, who drew considerable attention with his provocative report on education in Russia (TIME, April 27). Talking with Correspondent Ruth Galvin, Bronfenbrenner elaborated some of his ideas about the family and children.

THE battle today is not between children and parents; the battle is between society on one side and families on the other, and we've got to reorder things so that human values can again get some recognition. I have a great deal of sympathy for the anger and frustration that are reflected in the Women's Liberation movement. Not only are women discriminated against in the so-called man's world, but they have now been deprived of prestige in their role as women. It used to be that a mother would get recognition in her neighborhood for the fact that she had brought up her children well. Now the mother still has the responsibility for her children, but not enough support or recognition. Her husband is away most of the time, and her neighbors are often not really her friends. We are creating a situation where women are frustrated in both worlds.

We are also creating a world where parents give things to their children instead of giving themselves. For example, a cab driver I had in Washington turned out to be a shoemaker who has taken a second job in order to be able to earn money to buy his kids a tape recorder and other expensive gifts for Christmas. The effect is, he's not going to see anything of his kids for a month and a half. This man is a good parent, but he just thinks that a new tape recorder is more valuable to his kids than he is.

We did a cross-cultural study in child-rearing practices in America and West Germany. Of course we expected that German parents would be stricter than American parents, and, sure enough, they were. But they were also more affectionate and spent more time with their children. Perhaps when we think we are being permissive, we are really just not paying attention to our kids. Parents have been told by experts like me, "Let your child be himself," and that has been taken to mean: Let him grow up by himself. But children should not grow up associating only with other children because they haven't much to give to each other. I regard Dickens as one of the great child psychologists. Fagin, for example, was very clearly an evil man. But the Artful Dodger is a human being in every sense of the term. He's not alienated, because he has had dealings with someone who is somebody, even though he's corrupt. The important thing is to be brought up by somebody. Before we worry about who it is, let it, please God, be somebody. It is very important for a child that there be a person on the other end of the seesaw, and that each reckons with the other. There's a great phrase by the Soviet educator, Anton Makarenko, about bringing up children: "The maximum possible demands, with the maximum possible respect."

Our society has become far too age-segregated. And I really question Margaret Mead's observation that the world has changed so fast technologically that the adults are immigrants in the country of the young. After all, these new things are the products of the adult world.

We just do not try hard enough to involve the different ages with each other. When an American architect plans a housing project, he puts the playgrounds here so that the noise doesn't bother, and the parents have another park there. The European architect does it the other way. He plans the playgrounds so that the children can run over and see the parents and the parents can watch them. Or look at different societies in terms of their games. I'm for the revival of potato-sack racing because anyone can do it, and if Grandpa beats the three-year-old it's a great victory.

What we ought to do is present a world in which the child sees different kinds of people at work and at suffering and at play. This notion that children need to be protected and should never see anyone in pain, or old, or smelling bad, I think is a false notion. How can anyone appreciate joy if he doesn't know what sadness is?

I would say to parents, number one, that the young people do not think as ill of you as you think. Two, that they think you think worse of them than you really do. And three, it is not your fault. The nature of the problem is the way life is organized for us. We have to really support those institutions, those businesses, those politicians who are ready to change things, so that children and people concerned with children have some space and status. A lot of labor turnover and absenteeism, for instance, derives from the fact that people are concerned about their children. If better arrangements were made by business for family life, morale would be higher. One of the signs that a society is beginning to lose its vitality is that children cease to be central in the lives of the people. If you want to turn a society around, it's around children that you have the hope of doing it.

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