Goodenough1 parenting. Progress, policy, and caution

There is a scene in an episode of 'Walking with Cavemen' in which from a distance Robert Winston 'watches' a Neanderthal family gathered around a campfire--a setting that had no doubt been repeated many times over many thousands of years. Observing the gathering through Winston's eyes, one is struck by the tenderness displayed towards the youngest of the group. The family interactions are all the more poignant, because from our vantage point of history, we recognize that this species, so close to our own, is soon destined for extinction. The camera moves from the family and settles back on Winston. His face seems simultaneously to reflect several emotions--appreciation, sadness, and even love. This little group is being pushed out by our own more resourceful, bigger brained and perhaps more aggressive species into ever more difficult country. One imagines that the parents are doing all they can to protect their children, but we know that their quest will ultimately fail. There is absolutely no sense of reproach in Winston's demeanor or commentary--no hint that perhaps these parents could have done better. Rather, we seem to recognize through Winston's eyes that we are witnesses to a tragedy of truly Shakespearean proportions. The wisdom of 'common sense' suggests that being well-parented as children, and witnessing others effectively parenting their children, is likely to assist significantly our own parenting efforts and out children. In truth however, we have very few details about how children were treated and thought about throughout the ages by their parents and carers. There are stories of systemic infanticide, stories of what we now clearly recognise as child exploitation, and stories of children being given minimum attention until they reached the age or 2 years or more, after which it was accepted that they had a fighting chance of survival. But there are contrary stories, such as those described in Boccaccio's Decameron, of acute parental grief at the deaths of infants during the Great Plague of the fourteenth century. For all of their careful scholarship, volumes such as Aries' (1962) Centuries of Childhood are based on fragments of information that have many gaps and leave us with many questions. However, what seems generally agreed upon is that each culture and each era seems to emphasise different desirable qualities in parents and different desirable outcomes in the children. Shaffer's (1998 analysis of decision-making principles regarding what is best for children is the culmination of many years of careful research into children's emotional and psychological needs. Reflecting on our use of 'common sense' as a guide to parenting, Schaffer concluded that 'utterly different practices and mutually contradictory practices of child rearing are all passed off in this way' (p3). How do members of our species become effective parents? At an experiential level, much of our parenting appears to be instinctive. We tend to be drawn, for example, to the facial features of a child. Children's laughter is infectious. Few of us would stand idly by if a child were in distress. But just as husbands' 'chastisement' of their wives was not generally acknowledged as a broader political issue until well into the second half of last century (Pizzey, 1973; Scutt, 1983; Walker, 1984), we appear to be still coming to terms with a long history of what our contemporary culture recognises as child abuse (de Mause, 1998). The causal mechanisms that produce either well-functioning or problematic children are clearly complex. At the extremes there are of course the well-known studies of higher primates (Harlow, 1962), who when deprived of affection as infants, become highly dysfunctional as sexual partners and as parents. Among institutionalised and significantly deprived Romanian children adopted by British parents after the rail of the Ceausescu regime, many struggled to become normally functioning adults. …