In the Leave It to Beaver suburban world of the American '50s, the family and the child were enveloped in a cherishing mythology. Americans, it was even said, had grown obsessively kiddified; they were child-worshipers who sentimentalized their offspring in a complacent land of Little League and Disney. Toward the end of the Eisenhower years, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote a lively diatribe about the "cult of the child," which he denounced as "this most maudlin of primitivisms."
Today some Americans worry that in the last decade or so the U.S. has veered to the opposite extreme, that it has developed a distaste for children that sometimes seems almost to approach fear and loathing. If that is true, the United Nations' International Year of the Child, just beginning, comes at an ironic time. The premise of the International Year, of course, is not so much that the world's children are disliked or unwelcome as that too many of them are undernourished, badly housed and ill educated. The First World and the Third World have somewhat different perspectives on children.
Those who detect a pervasive, low-grade child-aversion in the U.S. find it swarming in the air like pollen. They see a nation recoiling from its young like W.C. Fields beset by Baby Leroy. Of the 50,000 parents who responded to a query by Advice Columnist Ann Landers a while ago, a depressing 70% said
that, given the choice again, they would not have children; it wasn't worth it. Although a few states have laws forbidding discrimination by landlords against families with children, huge apartment complexes and even entire communities have policies to keep the brats out. A Georgia couple that endorsed a detergent in a TV commercial were assaulted by angry telephone calls and letters denouncing them for having six children. All over the country, school budgets are being killed in tax revolts. That may be more an indication of disastrous inflation and a protest against bad educational systems than a specifically antichild gesture, but such refusals suggest something about a community's priorities.
Specialists in the field now estimate that there are at least 2 million cases per year of child abuse, not 1 million as thought earlier. Even granting that the statistic seems inflated because more cases are reported now, experts think that there has been a substantial real increase in the practice. Last year's Supreme Court decision allowing teachers to spank children in school, thinks Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, sets an example for institutional abuse, an offense that is even more widespread than abuse by parents. The business of child pornography flourishes. In Los Angeles the police estimate that 30,000 children, many of them under the age of five, are used each year as objects of pornography. A number of them are actually sold or rented for the purpose by their parents. Perhaps both child abuse and child pornography can be regarded as merely aberrational; some child abuse is actually a bent expression of too much caring, and kiddie porn (both the selling of it and the taste for it) may be just a ragged, ugly leftover of the sexual revolution. Still, the profound hostility accumulated in all that child abuse and pornography could be used to wage a medium-sized war.