Why do we focus so intensely on change as we move into the new millen- nium? Wasn’t change a hallmark of the twentieth century? Shouldn’t we be used to it by now?
The technology and media observer Douglas Rushkoff points out that the change we are experiencing now is different in several important ways from the normal evolutionary change in human society. Certainly the rate of change, facilitated by rapid advancements in technology, is faster than it has ever been. Rushkoff writes, “Today’s ‘screenager’—the child born into a cul- ture mediated by television and computers—is interacting with his world in at least as dramatically altered a fashion from his grandfather as the first sighted creature did from his blind ancestors, or a winged one from his earthbound forebears” (1996, 3). Rushkoff points out that the technology-driven change
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4 4 The Changing Lives
of Children
we are experiencing also tends to be nonlinear and nonprogressive, hence unpredictable and often threatening to those of us who like to feel in control.
He is optimistic about our future, however, and suggests that we follow the lead of the children who are immigrating successfully into the future. The children, he claims, are the advance scouts for an unknown future. They are developing the adaptive skills for a life of constantly changing cultural, social, and technological environments. They are already, he says, “the thing that we must become” (p. 13).
Historian Gary Cross offers another perspective on the discontinuity that comes with the turbulent change of our time. In his fascinating social histo- ry of American toys, Kids’ Stuff(1997), he argues that toys have tradition- ally reflected parents’ hopes for their children. At the beginning of the twen- tieth century, these were usually very gender-specific hopes. Boys were given erector sets and other sophisticated construction toys that would introduce them to the world of technology, while girls were given dolls to mother. Both boys and girls were given blocks to develop their fine motor skills. Toy man- ufacturers and retailers still tend to market their products along gender lines, as anyone who has walked the aisles of Toys “R” Us or purchased a Happy Meal at McDonald’s is aware.
In the 1930s, toy manufacturers began to appeal directly to kids with toys based on childhood fantasies and mass media heroes such as Shirley Temple and Buck Rogers. Television advertising ratcheted up the campaign for the kids’ market dramatically. Now, Cross claims, after their children’s pre- school years most parents no longer think about the educational value of a toy or how a toy might prepare their child for the future. They are more con- cerned with gratifying a child’s craving for the latest craze than with the qual- ity of the child’s interaction with the toy.
Toys no longer mark the child’s passage from one age to another or even the observance of special holidays such as Christmas, although that is still a blockbuster time for toy companies. The popular toys of childhood are now the toys of popular child culture, cleverly conceived and marketed by adults, of course. Cross speculates that in this time of rapid change, parents no longer know what kind of future to prepare their children for, and this has changed the meaning of childhood in some important ways. He explains, “When toys lost their connection to the experience and expectations of parents, they entered a realm of ever-changing fantasy. Indeed, the parent’s gift to the child increasingly became not the learning of the future or reason or even the sharing
of a joy of childhood. Parents instead granted children the right to participate in a play world of constant change without much guidance or input from adults” (p. 227). If Cross is right, it is a telling commentary when parents are so accustomed to change that they dare not make assumptions about their children’s future.
In order to keep up with the rapid pace of life itself, Americans find them- selves getting busier and busier. In a world where “multitasking” is consid- ered a survival skill, even children’s lives are becoming more organized, with less leisure time for the idle play that was once considered their birthright. A study conducted at the University of Michigan tracked children for thirty years. Using 1981 as a benchmark for comparison with 1997, the re- searchers found that children today spend eight more hours a week in school (because of increasing participation in preschool, not the lengthening of the elementary school day), two hours more in organized sports, forty-five min- utes more studying, and three more hours on household work than they did sixteen years ago. They watch less TV than they used to and spend more than two hours less playing during a typical week. Free time represented 40 percent of a child’s weekday hours in 1981; it had shrunk to 25 percent by 1997, and kids had to fit studying and housework into that limited time. On average, children in 1997 were reading for pleasure only seventy-seven min- utes a week (Healy, M. 1998).
Inevitably, adults worry that children today are growing up too fast, being pushed into the stressful pace of adult life much too early. A recent Newsweekarticle about the lives of children between the ages of eight and fourteen described them as a “generation stuck on fast forward” (Kantrowitz and Wingert 1999, 64.) One ten-year-old girl who is profiled in the article worries about the three hours of homework she has to do each night, about homelessness, and about classmates who are already starting to date. “My life is really hectic right now,” she says. “I’m already doing what some peo- ple in the 1800s weren’t doing until they were full-grown adults. I get up at 6:30 every morning, go to school and have to rush through all my classes, come home and work on my homework, go to ice-skating lessons, watch a little TV, talk on the phone, do more homework and practice my violin. If I’m lucky, I get to sleep by eleven. And then the entire ordeal starts again” (p.
65). Her mother says this is what it’s like to be a child of the nineties.
Librarians might wonder when or why this child would ever find time to visit the local library or read a book for pleasure.