Sociologists are saying the most dramatic cultural change taking part in western society these years, is the loss of a unique children’s culture. Stories, songs, rules, games, traditions, etc. passed on from (older) children to (younger) children through the generations – many at least since the Middle Ages, are now being lost. Foremost because there simply is not enough children to carry it on, and what are, are often divided into groups based strictly on age, like the school room, where the cultural heritage passed on from older to younger children cannot take place, but also because of a greater parental supervision and interference and adult sanitizing and suffocating rules.
The open spontaneous children’s space where children would run around in big groups with many children of all ages, not under strict adult supervision, and where the older children would teach the younger children, it hardly exists any more. I know this personally from places I’ve lived. Many places it’s simply not possible to send the children outdoors to play, because there would be nobody to play with – the streets and playground are empty. Then it has to be pre-planned, the parents talk to each other and agree on a time and place, and take the children there, or the children meet in specific children’s clubs or such. But all such planned meetings are under parental control and supervision and often partitioned into age brackets – all in all not places to transmit children’s culture. And now the children are not taught the rules of the old games of the songs and stories and all the tradition etc. all that belong to children’s culture. And few people seem to talk about it or find it anything much to worry about.
Many parents try to compensate by teaching themselves their own children the games and songs, or the children read about it in books or watch it on television - but all this can never be anything but a stale and poor substitute without future.
Is this an actual problem? Am I the only one to find this very sad? Is there anything to be done, or is the best that can be hoped for some Grimm brothers documenting what was before it’s gone?
Uh…what? There’s six billion people on the planet, and population shows no sign of decline overall. Are you talking about a specific country with declining population? Is declining population really a part of this problem? It sounds to me like the other factors you cite are much more likely to be driving this issue.
Rune lives in Denmark where there are 12 births to every 1,000 women. Here in the US we have 65 births to every 1,000 women. They are barely maintaining their population (5.3 million), whereas we’ll likely break 300,000,000 by the end of 2006.
Memes, it has been argued, are created by our neurology. As Human neurology is essentially unchanging, a new “children’s culture” with very similar traits, will re-create itself ASAP, when the correct conditions exist.
No I was talking about western countries, and was thinking mostly of Europe I guess. The birthrate of Denmark is actually in the upper reach of the European average, and when sociologists in Denmark talk about this loss happening, I can’t imagine how it must be in the areas with but half the number of children than Denmark.
But the same things are happening in much of the US. Many states in the US have a birthrate lower than Denmark, so the same things must be happening there. Also probably you have even more of a problem with parental and adult control and supervision.
I would think the small number of children is probably the root cause, but perhaps it could be countered by different parenting strategies. Some fear that the current trends produce inactive, dependent and unimaginative children (and adults), that don’t take initiative and always will have to be shown how to play.
I can’t see how you can say the birth-rate of the USA is 5 times that of Denmark. As far as I know there’s about 1.6-1.7 child / woman in Denmark, and 2.0-2.1/woman in the US.
uh? What a depressing thought. That would mean we were doomed to go around recreating the same things in all eternity. Perhaps Cecil is a stoic? Also it would mean all cultures around the globe are essentially the same and always have been – can’t agree with you there.
As Rune points out, you’ve dramatically overstated the difference in fertility between the U.S. and Denmark. From the U.S. census source you cite, “Women 40 to 44 years in 2000 will probably end their childbearing years with an average of 1.9 children…” while the Danish source says “fertility rate: 2 children per female.” The 65 births to every 1,000 women is only for women of childbearing age – hence the discrepancy with the Danish figure (12 to every 1,000 women).
As to the OP, yes, it would be sad, if it were true. I’m not totally convinced it is. Here in the States, elementary school still seems to transmit kid culture quite effectively. And certain aspects of that culture haven’t changed much in decades, at least.
I suspect that even in Western countries, this all depends on the neighborhood you live in. Poorer neighborhoods are more likely to have more kids, while wealthier ones are likely to have fewer. My neighborhood is nothing like the one I grew up in, but I can drive a few miles and find plenty that are.
The only culture that doesn’t change is a dead culture. Since most people tend to place a great deal of value in their culture I can understand why they might be worried about it being lost. France is worried about their culture degrading due to foreign influence, cochlear implants are controversial in the deaf community, in part, because it has the potential to wipe out deaf culture, and cultures that still practice hunter/gatherer means of acquiring food are rapidly going by the wayside. I can understand why people would be afraid of losing their culture because most of us identify with it.
However, change is just something we’ve all got to learn to accept.
NO, PB was certainly old by the American Civil War as a regional legend in the Great Lakes area. Linguistic clues seem to indicate a French-Canadian origin of at least part of the stories.
His story went national in a number of magazine articles in the first few years of the last century.
So he is a real part of American folklore. And I am the only one who knows the name of every man on his crew.
True. I wish you could persuade some of the anti-immigration folks to adopt your view.
However, just because some amount of change is always inevitable doesn’t mean that all changes must be equally welcomed, or that some changes can’t be successfully resisted. Those are the specific questions about this particular change that I think the OP is trying to address.
Here’s a question: Is traditional “kid’s culture” also declining on account of the greater gender integration of modern childhood? I was thinking back to my experiences in elementary school in the early '70s, and it dawned on me that most of what I remember as playground tradition was exclusive to girls. Jumping rope and the classic jump-rope rhymes like “Cinderella” and “Teddy Bear”. Clapping rhymes like “Miss Lucy” and “Miss Merrimac” and “Playmate”. Hopscotch.
Come to think of it, I can’t even remember what the boys were doing while we were playing “girl games”. Oh, except for peeking up skirts and chanting “I see London, I see France…” (Boys! :rolleyes: )
Anyway, is “kid culture” declining these days partly because children are less sex-segregated, and the traditional sex-segregated pastimes are being dropped?
Also… The “culture” the OP is talking about was transmitted by parents and schools in my day, not on the playground. There’s an elementary school near my house, and when I walk by during recess, the kids are playing the same games I played-- games like dodgeball or just generally running around screaming their goddam heads off!!!
I think it’s more the socialization process that has changed, where kids seem to spend more time with their parents and organized activities than playing in unstructured groups. I don’t know if this is “good” or “bad”, but it’s different.
I work in a museum. We have a children’s program that we do once a month. One of these programs involves having the kids play Victorian children’s games. I imagine that in the Edwardian era, people were bemoaning that the morals-teaching games of their childhood were no longer being played, replaced by new games.
I don’t think it’s the game that’s important. It’s what the child learns through cooperative play: following rules, group problem-solving, etc. If children are playing less in groups (and I’m not so sure that they really are on a wide-scale basis) then they will miss out on acquiring these skills through play. Does that mean they won’t be well-adjusted adults? Not necessarily. One can learn these skills in other ways.
Well, objectively no it’s not a bad thing, but objectively the entire planet being wiped out by a chaos dust cloud wouldn’t be a bad thing.
However, I think part of the experience of who we are has to do with identity, and there are certain aspects of identity that I think are favorable and should be preserved. One of these is cohesive community. I think the segmenting of children by age group is undesirable simply because it erodes community, the kids don’t know the older kids in their neighborhood, they have less contact with those in proximity to them by age and geographical distance. They have fewer social bonds that will help them throughout their life.
I have a pretty extensive community, and some of my friends are beginning to have children, and the children become a part of that community. It’s good for children to know each other and grow up together, and learn things from other children. Something I found as a problem throughout my life, and see a lot of other people my age dealing with is an idea that adults seemed to have that we should be older than we were, there was a constant push for us to be older more mature. In my case my parents often expected me to be more mature than they were, something I could never fathom. I think this is one of the problems with kids being immersed in a world of adults, it removes the children’s ability to fully be children, and the adults ability to fully be adults. The kids need someone near their age that won’t seem so far off in the distant future to emulate, someone who is kind of like them, but just a little older and wiser.
I think that a lot goes on in the world of children that adults are oblivious to, and I think that this sort of segmentation leads to 14 year olds selling pot to 10 year olds, because they have no social bonds to one another. This segmentation is a very distasteful side effect to “machine” culture. The idea that we are just parts of a big machine and that childhood is about raising a good little worker.
I think in western society community is destressed, at least in America, and I think it’s detrimental to our society as a whole.
I don’t dobut for a moment that child culture is changing, but is there really any documentation that it’s disappearing? My children knew the main points of the Star Wars mythology long before they’d seen any of the films. I’m not sure anything important is lost if the archetypical bad guy is Darth Vader instead of the troll king inside the Dovre mountains. They know kids’ songs, and create and share their own parodies (with that unmistakable touch of kiddie humour). One of the first English phrases my oldest learnt, when he was six, was “fuck you” accompanied with a creative version of the traditional gesture. I’m pretty sure he didn’t learn that from a grown up
Admittedly, I don’t recognise Rune’s description of the lack of unsupervised play time. Where I live, children go visit each other on their own, and play outdoors unsupervised, from age six or so and up. Most of the playing is with those close in age, but there’s some mingling, and of course exchange of culture through older and younger siblings. I can’t see that there’s more age segregation than when I was their age thirty years ago.
