Has Childhood Really Changed That Much?

Recalling his small-town upbringing in Ohio before the Civil War, the novelist William Dean Howells remarked that he had led something of a dual existence, sometimes devoted to a “world of foolish dreams” that the adults in his life tried to impose on him, but just as often spent with other children who did the serious work—“swam, and fished, and hunted, and ran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffed in the Boy’s Town.” As Howard P. Chudacoff’s engaging new volume, Children At Play: An American History (NYU Press, 288 pages, $27.95), shows, however much children’s play has changed over the centuries, there remains an eternal tension between the ideas that adults try to impose and the freedoms that kids insist on.

“Children have always cultivated their own underground of unstructured and self-structured play, which they did not often talk about with adults,” Chudacoff writes. “This book attempts to peek into that underground; it focuses as much on what children did as on what adults thought and wanted children to be doing.”

An accomplished social historian, Chudacoff has written a wide-ranging survey of children’s play since colonial times. In the interest of disclosure, he was one of my professors at Brown University, where I attended graduate school, but I don’t feel the least bit biased when I say that unlike many academic historians, he writes with great clarity and dry wit, and his book should appeal to general readers as well as specialists. In it he combines innovative archival research with a sweeping overview of the literature on the history of childhood.

In seven chapters that take the reader through a chronological history of children’s play, Chudacoff is careful to emphasize that the nature of recreation has varied greatly among different races (he is concerned mainly with white, Indian, and black children) and in different eras and places. Still, several currents run through the book.

First, although Americans have had fewer children over time, children have become more important to adults, and thus childhood itself has emerged as a discrete category. Preadolescent children made up 25 percent of the population in antebellum America, but by 1920 that ratio fell to 21 percent, and by 1940 just 17 percent. This meant that parents had more time to lavish on individual kids. Meanwhile, as young people spent longer stretches of time in school, they developed a distinctive peer culture.

In colonial times, children were often viewed as a suspect breed, neither useful nor understandable. The New England preacher Cotton Mather thought babies were pure evil—“the Devil has been with them already. . . . They go astray as soon as they are born”—while the more forgiving Methodist Church of America cautioned that they should “be indulged with nothing which the world calls play. Let this rule be observed with the strictest nicety; for those who play when they are young, will play when they are old.”

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many adults had changed their tune, coming to see childhood as an important and formative stage in life. But this didn’t make grown-ups any less determined to structure young people’s recreational activities. Social scientists like G. Stanley Hall, Luther Halsey Gulick, and John Dewey—to say nothing of latter-day professionals like Dr. Benjamin Spock—had much to say about how play time could best be structured to build good citizens, while as early as 1802 experts cautioned parents against the dangers of unsupervised tomfoolery. “Jumping over backs is a harmless amusement,” explained the early-nineteenth-century tome Youthful Sports, but children “should not often play at Flydown, which is a violent pitching upon another’s back from some stated distance. A little boy was one day playing at Flydown, when, pitching too far, he missed the back, and falling on one side, broke his arm!” Worries like these led to such enterprises as the Progressive Era playground movement, which advocated setting aside safe, monitored spaces where children could safely pursue wholesome, adult-approved activities.

This leads to the second major argument in Chudacoff’s book, that try as they might, adults have never really overcome their kids’ autonomy. Progressive reformers wrung their hands at boys’ preference for hopping rides on streetcars and hurling snowballs at innocent passersby over the more structured games that took place in school gymnasiums. And though toys became increasingly important fixtures in children’s lives when the new market economy took hold in the early nineteenth century, a pre–Civil War child named Jeanette Leonard Gilder probably spoke for future generations when she expressed a preference for “a few odds and ends” like a broken cookstove, a washboard, and a one-legged doll. “These were my greatest treasures, because I could really use them,” she remembered. Concerned adults weren’t entirely wrong. With the growth of large cities, street play became increasingly dangerous. In New York City, 477 children died in 1922 in automobile-related accidents. Still, parents could never really harness the energies and imaginations of their kids, try as they might.

This isn’t to say that children have lived free from the physical and ideological constraints that adults tried to impose on them. In the antebellum South, slave children played freely with white children, but the games they played were often explicitly instructive: Simulated whippings and slave auctions taught young Southerners of both races about the brutal realities to expect in their adult lives. After the 1890s, popular toys like “Chopped Up Niggers” jigsaw puzzles, “Pickaninny Tenpins,” and shooting ranges with African-American targets taught white children vicious lessons about the humanity of their black peers.

Chudacoff closes with a fascinating chapter about contemporary children’s play. Looking at videogames, he concludes that some, like Grand Theft Auto, in which a character has sex with and murders a prostitute, are clearly pernicious, while others, particularly SimCity, promote creativity and imaginativeness.

Children at Play is a strong addition to the growing literature on childhood, but it’s also good reading for adults seeking a fresh perspective on their own kids. A word of warning, though. Chudacoff is a good scholar, but he admits that there is a limit even to his ability to penetrate the hidden lives of children. As Catherine Elizabeth Havens, age nine, wrote in her diary more than 150 years ago, “I don’t think grownup people understand what children like.”