First Dads by Joshua Kendall

Author:Joshua Kendall [KENDALL, JOSHUA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads Of State, History / United States / General, Family & Relationships / Parenting / Fatherhood, Psychology / Personality
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

A few years ago, Yale law professor Amy Chua started a national dialogue about extreme parenting with her bestselling memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which documents how she raised her two daughters, Sophia and Louisa. Chua chided today’s Western parents for not pushing their children hard enough. In contrast, Chinese mothers, she insisted, have long known how to instill success in their offspring. The key is to demand perfection in all endeavors. Chua’s house rules included nothing but As; she also expected her daughters to be first in all their classes, except for drama and gym. And backtalk was verboten. “My goal as a parent,” Chua often reminded her girls, “is to prepare you for the future—not to make you like me.” To ensure compliance with the program, Chua did not hesitate to resort to intimidation; she once called Sophia “garbage” and threatened to burn her stuffed animals.

In a coda to Chua’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek manifesto, her elder daughter, Sophia, offered a clever riposte to her mother’s offhand remark that her draconian parenting techniques harked back to those of the Founding Fathers, who, so she claimed, possessed “Chinese values.” “Mommy, if the Founding Fathers thought that way,” responded the youngster, “then it’s an American way of thinking.”

Authoritarian parenting does have deep roots in America, but its heyday was actually a century before the Founders came on the scene. Chua’s assertion that playdates are a waste of time has its analogue in the Puritan idea that most forms of child’s play are sinful. Puritan fathers were a lot like Chinese mothers. They, too, worried that “if indolence, selfishness and willfulness were not overcome in childhood, these traits would dominate adulthood,” as Steven Mintz noted in his landmark study, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004). According to Mintz, childhood in America has gone through three phases. During the premodern phase, which lasted until about 1750, patriarchal authority reigned supreme. America’s first few generations of fathers considered it their duty to prepare children to enter the working world as early as possible. They were also supposed to choose careers for their sons and spouses for their daughters.

Influenced by the progressive pedagogy of political theorists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and novelists such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, Colonists in the second half of the eighteenth century began to develop the modern view, which emphasized love over coercion. Parents were now encouraged to lead by example rather than by rules. The postmodern phase emerged in the 1950s, when mothers gradually started to work outside the home and children started to receive much less adult supervision. Along with these changes came a significant decrease in the acceptability of spanking and other aggressive forms of discipline. By 2000, just twenty-three states allowed corporal punishment in schools, as opposed to all but one sixty years earlier.

Born in 1735, John Adams subscribed to the parenting practices of his Puritan forebears. But while the prickly New Englander expected his own children to

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