The Erosion of Childhood
Polokow, Valerie (1992).
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 231 pages. $13.95. ISBN 0226780058.
In 1992, the University of Chicago Press issued a new edition of Valerie Polokow's fine study, The Erosion of Childhood, which first came out more than ten years ago. The book retains its relevance, and I recommend it to those readers of Children’s Environments who are unfamiliar with it.
Polokow addresses a painful irony: women's pursuit of their right to work, and their consequent need for childcare, has tended to result in the oppression of young children in institutions which are frequently designed not to meet their emotional needs, but simply to contain them in the most efficient way for the adults involved.
Polokow is ideally situated to confront this dilemma. She states in her preface that she is a working parent, a feminist, and a child advocate. She began this project when her first child was a toddler in need of day care. Polokow makes no pretense to being an unbiased observer, but neither does she enter the fray with a single axe to grind. Unlike many critics of day care, she is wholeheartedly committed to the ideal of women's rights; unlike some feminists, her concern extends beyond women's rights to include those of children.
Polokow's research goal, in broad terms, is to understand the meaning and experience of modern childhood. In more specific terms, she seeks to explore the reality of children's lives in the institutions in which many of them spend most of their waking hours. She is not interested in cost-benefit analyses or cognitive assessment scales, but in the phenomenological substance of children’s experience.
Over a two-year period, Polokow spent intense periods of observation in five different day care centers in the American Midwest. She chose neither the best nor the worst of them; by standard criteria ratings, they would be considered 'good.' In the interests of preserving anonymity she changed many identifying characteristics, and has drawn what she describes as composite pictures of people and events, while striving always to preserve the words and gestures of her subjects.
Polokow describes one day care center in relatively glowing terms. It is a federally funded, inner-city, community-based center for low income children, and its stated aim is to recapture the black cultural tradition of bonded community. The school is casual and homelike; meals happen when children are hungry, tricycles are ridden among the art tables, and events happen as opposed to being planned in advance. Little attention is paid to cognitive development, and the children lag behind their peers in other centers in this regard. Yet they are unusually curious, bright, affectionate, and cooperative. Polokow is particularly struck by two features of the school: the presence of 'grandmothers' who, from their comfortable chairs at the front of the room, act as nurturers, disciplinarians, and links with the past; and the high tolerance of what, in some other centers, would be labeled as deviant behavior on the part of the children. Children are disciplined and contained when their behavior is overly aggressive, but they are not considered to be abnormal or disturbed.
The other four centers, which run the gamut in terms of philosophy, all come under attack by Polokow: the Montessori School for its rigidity and its discouragement of cooperative play; the Golda Meir Nursery for its subordination of child time to the all-important schedule; the Pinewoods Free School for its complete lack of limits, and for the high level of aggression that results among the children. Worst of all is the center run for profit, where the emotional needs of children are always subordinate to efficiency, and to the convenience of an underpaid and apathetic staff. All four centers, Polokow believes, deny their young charges the right to be children, to experiment with the world, to act with spontaneity, and to discover themselves within the secure limits set by adults who are crazy about them.
What is perhaps most telling in her project is the very willingness of adults to expose themselves to her critical eye. The director of the for-profit daycare, for instance, seems to have no misgivings at all about sharing his concern for the bottom line. A disregard for children's real needs is so deeply embedded in our ideology that it is often difficult for us as adults even to recognize when we are participating in it.
Polokow's book offers an opportunity to parents and others to look through her clear eyes at the institutions they choose as primary environments in their children's lives.
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