The invention of childhood: Are we stifling our kids?

Richard Whittall found a lifetime of music because his father let him take the subway across town. What opportunities are we denying our children in the name of protecting childhood?

“Until the end of the Middle Ages, and in many cases afterwards too, in order to obtain initiation in a trade of any sort whatever – whether courtier, soldier, administrator, merchant or workman – a boy did not amass the knowledge necessary to ply that trade before entering it, but threw himself into it; he then acquired the knowledge through everyday practice, from living and working with adults who were already fully trained.”

– Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood

“Try finding a simple choral arrangement of a Top 40 pop song. The kids will enjoy pretending to be the rock and pop stars they are accustomed to hearing on the radio. Naturally, finding something appropriate can be a challenge. You’ll have to make sure the song doesn’t have any questionable content.”

– from 4 Fun Engagement Ideas for Children’s Choirs.

Beginning as early as the 15th century, boys and men choirs were a staple of English church music for generations, singing music for daily services in revered places of worship like Westminster Abbey and King’s College, Cambridge. That tradition eventually came over to Canada, but by the 1990s several of these church choirs were declining in numbers. At the Gentleman and Boys Choir of St. Simon’s Anglican Church in Toronto, the choir director, an English conductor and composer named Derek Holman, offered the boys a $30 recruitment fee if they could get one of their friends to join.

That’s how I ended up singing there. St. Simon’s is where I learned how to sight read music when I was 12 years old. I did it on the job – my first – as a treble chorister.

Dr. Holman had a simple teaching method. After an audition process that consisted of singing O Canada once through, more or less in tune, I had a pile of sheet music shoved into my hands and was told to sit down and sing the top line on each page along with the other boys in the front row.

I will never forget my panic at seeing those little black dots and lines all over the page, stumbling to understand which part was mine, trying to translate those intervals and dotted notes into something roughly resembling the melody sung by the other boys – some of whom were several years younger than me.

My experience with singing up to that point was reading along with the words written in marker on a paper easel for my middle school choir. At St. Simon’s, however, the multipart music I was struggling to read in the rehearsal room would have to be performed in three days. After that, the scores would be put back in the library and we would have precisely two rehearsals to learn an entire new set of works for the following Sunday.

Over the next few months – the time it would take to prepare a single middle school recital – I would learn and perform works spanning hundreds of years, by Benjamin Britten, Herbert Howells, Johann Sebastian Bach, Pierluigi da Palestrina, William Byrd, John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; masses, motets, responses, hymns, anthems and te deums.

None of it was easy, nor was it always fun. The music could be incredibly difficult, and the boys, who ranged in age from seven to 14, were hardly musical prodigies. Like me, most of them had only basic experience. I recall thrown hymn books and cash fines for mistakes and misbehaviour, and the occasional Sunday morning trainwreck

when a piece would nearly fall apart.

Despite this, at our best we could pull off works like Bach’s St. John Passion and Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, music that would challenge even the best adult professional choirs. When we were good, we were better than anyone. And when we were not so good, we shrugged it off and moved on – because it was our job.

In the end, St. Simon’s had a profound effect on many of the boys who sang there. Some, like me, continue to sing professionally. It wasn’t until later that we realized our experience there was unique. “Pretty much everywhere else in life, it’s ‘you’re the kid, we’re the adults,’” recalls John Cowling, who earned the $30 fee for getting me to join the choir.

“At St. Simon’s, obviously we were still treated to some degree as kids. But you were getting paid, you had a uniform, you had to get your gear on and go. We weren’t being coddled, we weren’t learning things by rote, we were performing all the same material as adults, which was hard, and we were producing a lot of it.”

We were motivated to perform by the way we were treated – not as aspiring student musicians, or cute kids with angelic voices, but as fully capable professionals.

Most of us think of childhood as biologically determined, a fixed state of being. Kids are born, ideally raised in a secure family unit upon which they depend for the next two decades. They are educated in slow, incremental stages in uniform age groups until they reach the age of 18 or 19, at which point they magically become adults. This model, which had crystallized during the Victorian era in the mid-to-late 19th century, came under question in 1960 with the release of French historian Philippe Ariès’s book L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, published in English as Centuries of Childhood two years later. Ariès made the audacious claim that our idea of childhood as a distinct, protected period of human development is a modern construct. “In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist,” he wrote. Ariès argued that over much of the past thousand years, children did not lead separate, protected lives as they matured

into adults. They were instead fully integrated members of the community. Prior to the mid-19th century, there were 12-year-old navy captains, 14-year-old soldiers (including one future U.S. president, Andrew Jackson) and 16-year-old math scholars like Blaise Pascal.

Though Ariès’s work was the subject of wide-ranging criticism from medieval historians who questioned his research methods, later scholars would follow his lead. Paula S. Fass, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has written that “the ‘modern’ perspective on children as sexually innocent, economically dependent, and emotionally fragile whose lives are supposed to be dominated by play, school and family nurture, provides a very limited view of children’s lives in the modern western past.”

Her book, The End of American Childhood, argues that early American societies prized independence and innovation in children. She presents a model for children’s work far different from the awful, Dickensian history of brutal and exploitative industrial child labour that still haunts our vision of childhood today, and which may in some cases have fuelled our current protectiveness towards our kids.

Fass writes that children in America were set to work early in life, as the size of the land and relatively small labour pool made it necessary. “This work was not, however, just a form of subordination as it tended to be elsewhere in the Western world,” Fass writes. “Instead, it often provided the young with a sense of the importance of their contribution and of their ability to create their own place in the world.”

Over time, however, this independence was lost as American parents became “absorbed in illusions of control and ideals of perfection” for their children. Parents today want to protect their kids while also engineering an ideal life path for them. As one reviewer wrote, Fass argues that the problem today is not one of “parents loving their children too much. Rather, it’s a desire to control them too much.”

Today, parents are questioned for letting their kids play alone in the backyard, TV networks are castigated for letting Super Bowl winners swear on live broadcasts, and parents will call university professors to complain about their adult children’s grades.

There is evidence to suggest this parental desire to directly control their children’s experiences is getting stronger over time. In 2006 Roger Hart, a professor of environmental and developmental psychology at

the City University of New York, completed a 30-year longitudinal study on how children play in a small town in Vermont. As a 2006 Monitor on Psychology magazine feature detailed, Hart “documented how they changed their physical environments through play such as by building houses, tree forts and ‘miniature dirt airports’ with sticks, grass, mud and leaves.”

When he returned to the town three decades later, however, Hart noted a dramatic shift. He “found that today’s parents are much more concerned about the minute-to-minute details of their children’s lives and want to know more details about the study than those 30 years ago.” Meanwhile, the boundary in which children were able to roam free from parental supervision had shrunk in many cases to the size of a backyard.

One psychologist, Robert Epstein, believes this parental control is extending to older and older children. He questions whether our current model of childhood is causing harm, particularly among teens whom, according to Epstein’s research, “appear to be subjected to about twice as many restrictions as are prisoners and soldiers and to more than ten times as many restrictions as everyday adults.” Epstein’s book Teen 2.0 argues that adolescence is a largely fictitious category of human development which merely serves to infantilize teenagers – who can and should be considered as mature adults.

Of course, while many parents are sympathetic to the idea that their children may be capable of far more than we give them credit for, they are understandably wary of threats to our current cultural model of childhood. There’s good reason to treat kids like kids: longitudinal studies such as the U.S.based Abecedarian project have shown a strong relationship between early childhood education and better outcomes later

in life. Part of the reason may be that the best of these programs emphasise ‘play-based curricula,’ in which children are encouraged to direct their own play and learn through direct experience, something we may not be great at continuing as they grow older.

There are other reasons to maintain the status quo. Threats to our current model of childhood development could potentially be used to justify a whole host of ideological aims, including cutting childcare funding, eliminating young offender laws and putting more kids into the workforce. It’s perhaps no coincidence that one of the blurbs on the cover of Epstein’s book Teen 2.0 was written by Newt Gingrich, a man who once called U.S. child labour laws “truly stupid.”

The truth is that we don’t need to put kids back in factories or try them as adults in court for them to flourish. Often all that’s needed is a subtle shift in perspective, the willingness to trust our kids a little more. Today, the competitive drive for parents to help their kids reach their full potential has ironically led us to put them in standardized extra-curricular programs meant to prepare them for real life – which seems for many to be arriving later and later.

Meanwhile, adults view children who accomplish things in the here and now as extraordinary; gifted prodigies who are destined to be leaders one day, rather than normal kids with a bit more freedom than their peers.

Though St. Simon’s was sold to parents as a way for their children to get a musical education, it was a a two-way street: the church also relied on us to provide music for the Anglican church services. We weren’t there just to learn, or to provide a nice photo op for our parents, or to prepare to be a musician at some future date – we were there to perform.

Additionally, leadership was assumed, not taught. Older kids, who wore thick red ribbons as part of our informal use of the Royal School of Church Music apprenticeship system, were expected to help out younger or probationary choristers, who wore light blue ribbons. When I later became head chorister at St. Simon’s, part of my job was to discuss with Dr. Holman the order in which the boys should sit so that they would both learn and behave in rehearsal. After overhearing me discuss it on the phone for an hour, my father was amazed.

Why didn’t he just pick the order himself like any other teacher would? I looked at him a little confused. “It’s because I know them better.”

When I put all this to Derek Holman, now 85 and still both as warm and intimidating as ever, he fails to see the novelty of his approach.“My crass answer is that it’s easier to get people to do something if they’re paid for it than if they’re not. I don’t see it as particularly remarkable.”

It’s not clear to me whether he fully understood the environment in which most of the boys spent our time outside of the rehearsal room. When, for example, my father, an Anglican priest in Etobicoke, told some of his parishioners that I would be singing at St. Simon’s three times a week, a few parents objected because it would mean taking the subway by myself.

“People told me that it wasn’t a very good idea,” he recalls. “They half-jokingly called it ‘child abuse.’ I didn’t understand it. I started travelling alone on public transit in Montreal at age seven.”

Had those parents succeeded in “protecting” me from the subway, the cost might have been a lifetime of musicianship. One wonders at the cost of our failure of imagination when it comes to our children’s ability to learn, create and lead as experts and virtuosos, not at some assigned future date, but here and now. My friend John may have pocketed the $30, but the reward for me was priceless.

NATIONAL POST ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE FAILLE