Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock
Something that’s amazed me my entire adult life is how lousy a predictor childhood is of adult success.
Children reared with all the advantages, the latest psychology and/or consistent discipline — turn out as anything from national leaders to routinely stable mid-levels to layabouts. Children born in abusive families or to poverty — can repeat the previous generation or become presidents.
The second amazing thing is to hear adults blame childhood for everything, but that comes from something that once had been whispered, courtesy of the mass media, especially afternoon talk shows: Psychological counseling. The roots of failure or misbehavior are interesting, but current research indicates doubts: Focusing on a malady’s beginning may not hasten its cure. Sure the psycho with a machine gun was beaten up as a kid but … duck!
Every once in a while you come across someone who credits his or her sound childhood with being well-adjusted and successful. (See: Bill Gates)
I’d blame my own mom and dad, but they sure tried hard. My reticence, shyness, eagerness to please and reluctance to offend is due to childhood. Those are drawbacks to ambition. However, those traits can be adapted into qualities, which is up to me.
In the early 1990s, I wanted to free-lance a column to a Little Rock alternative weekly, initially called Spectrum. At that point, the late Tony Moser was editor; I knew him from when he worked at the Arkansas Democrat. Tony was brilliant and a character and in not a good way, an alcoholic. Praise from colleagues and superiors was split oddly: Half called him a great reporter and a lousy writer and the other half said the opposite. [I believe a journalist cannot be one without the other.]
Spectrum’s office was above Juanita’s restaurant. I recall everything but the exact quote, but as I sat across from his desk Tony rejected my samples, saying something like:
You hold back, Ben. If you let it out, your column might be interesting, and we might use it.”
Tony might have made a sincere assessment, or he might have been being a jerk. That’s something you learn after a while: People don’t always say what they mean, or they mean what they say at the time but may not have thought it through, or their memory of their opinion is faulty. In any case they might be right.
Darn straight I “hold back” deliberately, for clarity, for polish and to avoid offense unless I intend to offend. That should make the writing better, right?
OK, I almost never want to offend, so Tony might just have been correct.
I acknowledge that to get anything creative done I have to shove my imagination past a taught timidity that I wish wasn’t there. If I was raised differently that might not have been present.
I was not allowed to see a lot of TV, and bedtime was enforced. I could look at Mad magazine at the grocery while Mom was shopping but not buy it. Comic books were forbidden; Mom had a fit when a dear older lady gave me a subscription to a Disney comic, never mind how sweet it was. This was based on child psychology from the 1950s, A Columbia journalism professor wrote a good book on that.
[My mom in her varied efforts to do the right thing gave me a subscription to Playboy on my 18th birthday, saying if I was old enough to vote and be drafted if there still was a draft then I should have that magazine. Thanks, Mom who is in Heaven, but by age 18 I don’t think it made much difference fixing the halts in my development.]
Hearing now of parents limiting media access — just TV online, to reduce exposing children to commercials — makes me reflective.
We live, however, in a mass popular culture, and owe young people an education in navigating through its wonders and past its junk. Ideally, every tempting media unit (movie, book, download, game) contains opportunities to teach discernment, morals and critical thinking, at all ages.
Some stuff is more warped now, and more accessible than buying three candy bars, an Icee and a blister card of tire valve caps at the convenience store and, oh by the way, good sir, one of those magazines behind the counter.
Did my mom smother me a bit, until I was 18? Would more indifference on her part have made any difference? There’s no way to know, I can’t be my own research control group.
Unless we sequester ourselves off the grid in the boonies, we can’t help but exist in American culture. To absent ourselves or the children in our families or communities from parts of it, at the least is ineffective and might seem to young people as hypocritical, and at most stymie creativity.
They will live in the world starting in high school, college or later; it shouldn’t come as a shock to them. The lame “Angie” was the only Rolling Stones song I heard until my first freshman “mixer” — Wow, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Satisfaction” were over 10 years old then, but not for me. That wasn’t the fault of my parents but Fort Smith radio stations of the 1970s.
Yet nearly all of us — the pampered few and the most-everyone else — grow up just fine in every generation.
As a thought-experiment, I wonder if I dropped in on a class at Fayetteville High School — in the world no one gets past the office without clearance — and asked the students sitting there — a relatively random sample — if they had seen any images on the Internet of extreme carnage or carnality — I’d count nearly every hand raised, before being escorted from the campus to a waiting police car.
After serving my prison sentence, I bet I would come out to find those now grown people in productive lives, among them leaders and creatives.
It may take a village to raise children, but a village also can squish them.
