The Ecology of Childhood

Creating a World Worthy of Our Children

Introduction: A New Understanding of Childhood

A profound paradox defines the condition of childhood at the start of the 21^st century. Medical and neurological scientists and educational researchers and practitioners have given us vast knowledge about children’s healthy development and growth. At the same time, we seem to be in danger of forgetting some fundamental and enduring truths about the nature of childhood and the needs of children. Indeed, childhood itself, as a uniquely important and vulnerable stage of human life, is under siege.

The U.S. Alliance for Childhood, a partnership of educators, health professionals, researchers, and other advocates for children, was founded in 1999 to address this issue. The partners in the Alliance propose that the time has come for a concerted, interdisciplinary effort to examine the underlying causes of an alarming decline in children’s health and well-being in recent years so that we can begin to reverse it.

Why are children under such pressure to grow up fast, to be ahead of the curve, to outpace all previous generations? What effect does our own anxiety as adults about the frightening technological changes and the threats of war and terrorism in the world today have on our children? Are we pushing children to meet unrealistic goals and expectations in ways that are actually harmful to them?

To understand these important questions, we must first ask more fundamental ones. What is our image of the child, and of childhood’s place in society and the natural world? How do we understand the inner life of the child, and what he or she most needs to develop into a smart, caring, strong, resilient, imaginative, and thoughtful adult?

If our image of the child is largely a mechanistic one, in which we see children’s minds as computers to be programmed and filled with information, then our educational and child-care policies and practices will emphasize technology, standardization, and pushing children to perform faster, at younger and younger ages. But if our image of the child is well-rounded, recognizing and respecting the natural and often nonlinear processes of human development and honoring the infinite variety of individual children’s strengths and needs, then our policies and practices will take a more varied and differentiated form.

In this paper I will argue that this more rounded—or ecological—view of the child calls for a new understanding of childhood itself.

The Conditions of Childhood Today

The Alliance for Childhood was formed because of growing concern among educators, researchers, and health professionals about children’s declining health and well-being. While the spread of contagious diseases in childhood has been largely contained in the wealthier nations through immunization and antibiotics, the rates of asthma, allergies, hyperactivity, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, obesity, autism, and violence among children and teen-agers have increased alarmingly.

The prevalence of obesity in children in the United States, for example, increased by 100 percent between 1980 and 1994, according to Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Teenage suicide rates have tripled over the past 50 years, according to Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University. [1] Many children are experiencing very high levels of stress. A recent analysis suggested that “decreases in social connectedness and increases in environmental dangers” were part of the reason. [2]

These conditions are not contagious in the narrow sense of the word, yet they are spreading rapidly among children in the United States and in many other countries. They could well be termed, without exaggeration, an epidemic.

These diseases have physical aspects, but they are also associated with emotional states and unhealthy life styles. No one, for example, would suggest that more exercise and a better diet would help a child avoid measles. Yet such changes would prevent many children from developing Type 2 diabetes, which is on the increase and is linked to obesity and a sedentary life.

Why are our children experiencing such stress and ill health? Poverty is one culprit. It contributes to poor nutrition and lack of access to day-care and preschool programs staffed by adults who are aware of the importance of a healthy diet, physical exercise, and developmentally appropriate educational practices. Poverty also exacerbates the inequities of our health-care system, in which many children go without preventive care or basic medical attention to chronic illnesses.

But poverty alone does not explain the increase in stress-related illness in children of all social groups, even the wealthy. Three simultaneous and interrelated trends have contributed to the general decline of childhood in recent years:

� First, many adults demand too much of children too soon—including an overly academic early childhood curriculum that short-changes children’s need for open-ended, imaginative play; a misguided emphasis on standardized tests and on comparing children to each other; and the effects of simple activity overload.

� Second, children increasingly suffer from a lack of strong, secure personal connections with caring adults.

� Third, there is growing evidence of harm to healthy development from overexposure to electronic media—including television, video games, and computers—and to an onslaught of advertising aimed at children.

Too Much, Too Soon

Child development experts have warned for years about the dangers of the increasingly unrealistic expectations of parents and teachers for young children’s growth. [3] The emphasis on early academics has come at the expense of what adults tend to regard as “childish” pursuits, like play. But research shows that imaginative play in early childhood leads to gains in language, problem-solving, and social skills, besides enhancing physical health. Edgar Klugman and Sara Smilansky, two leading researchers in the field, argue that the evidence of gains from play is so strong that it should be central to the curriculum in the education of young children through the age of eight. “In many crucial ways,” they write, “play, an old friend, awakens the potential of each child.”

Yet most public school kindergartens offer little time for such play. Most of the children’s school time is devoted to learning to write, read, and do arithmetic from age four or five onward. Many children are simply not ready for focused academic work at such young ages. The expectation that they will master these skills, whether they are developmentally ready or not, entails a serious and largely unrecognized risk.

By age seven almost all children are ready to master the elementary skills of literacy and manipulating numbers relatively easily, without stress. But few parents or early childhood educators in the U.S. are willing to wait that long. Many children are labeled as deficient or even disabled at age five or six on the basis of highly unreliable reading-readiness tests. The label, in many cases, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Young children of poverty are most at risk of being deprived of opportunities for creative play, especially outdoors and in nature, and thus of the physical and mental stimulation and relief from stress that such play affords. Efforts to force urban public schools, Head Start programs, and other early childhood programs to produce better results by emphasizing rote learning of letter and number facts and other so-called early literacy activities further deprive these children of the play time they desperately need. While intervention with literacy is sometimes necessary, a little can go a long way with three- to six-year-olds, and research indicates that emotionally rich experiences of shared language like books read aloud, storytelling, poetry, and rhyming games with favorite adults are most effective.

Research further tells us that the benefits of early childhood programs pushing academics, as opposed to more child-initiated play, are illusory. Dr. Lilian G. Katz, co-director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education, cites two recent studies, by Susan L. Golbeck [4] and by Rebecca Marcon [5] , in concluding, “The evidence suggests that whileacademic instruction appears to be beneficial when its effects are tested in the short term, it appears to put children at a disadvantage in the long term when compared to preschool programs that offer children opportunity for initiative and the kind of thoughtfulness associated with it.”

The proliferation of standardized tests used for high-stakes purposes—that is, to make important decisions about individual children’s futures—also adds to children’s stress levels. In many states, children are now threatened with being held back in school or denied a high-school diploma unless they can pass a particular multiple-choice test. Ratings of teachers, schools, and school districts are now tied to test scores, with salaries, bonuses, and even real-estate prices dependent on how children score. Evidence is growing that such policies are literally making many children sick, besides killing their joy in learning. School nurses and psychologists report that children as young as third-graders are aware of the high stakes attached to these tests and are exhibiting increased levels of anxiety and illness that are directly related to their fears of being held back or being unable to graduate. In California, the tests now include instructions for teachers on what to do when the child throws up on the exam booklet. [6]

Lack of Strong Relationships with Caring Adults

Research on child development also clearly shows that the most important contributor to both intellectual growth and emotional health is rich human interactions, at home, at school, and in the community. When children receive consistent attention and care from adults who understand and honor the general milestones of childhood as well as the unique talents and needs of the individual child, they thrive. “We do not need to justify such interactions as part of training in social skills or other desirable goals that some would argue should be left within the purview of the family,” write psychologists Stanley Greenspan and Beryl Benderly. “Rather, their importance is demonstrated by the fact that they are inextricably interwoven with the process of learning.” [7]

Similarly, research on urban school reform conclusively shows that the most effective strategies for improving struggling schools involve transforming the human relationships in the school. This means creating mutually supportive and caring communities where children, parents, and teachers have the time and the resources to get to know each other well and understand each other’s particular strengths and needs. A long-term study of the graduates of the singularly successful Central Park East schools in East Harlem found that there were three qualities that made these schools different: (1) the school took seriously and helped develop students’ special passions, talents, and interests; (2) the students developed strong relationships with their teachers and classmates; and (3) the school had a positive impact on students’ families. As a result, the students came to love learning, they felt valued, and they felt respected. [8]

Yet these truths about learning and schooling have been largely ignored by U.S. politicians and policymakers. The overwhelming trend in education in recent years has been policies based on “standards” and high-stakes testing, in which all children are judged by the same rigid yardstick and many of our best and most caring teachers are being driven from the profession by practices they see as inhuman and anti-child. Furthermore, a highly mechanistic approach to education—using, for example, scripted teaching—is taking hold as the most efficient means of preparing children for the tests.

Negative Effects of Emphasizing Technology

Add to these unhealthy trends the negative effects on children of excessive exposure to television and computer screens. These machines have become the favored babysitters for children both rich and poor from infancy onward. Many computer programs are now designed for babies and toddlers, and are aggressively marketed to parents anxious for their children to get a head start on learning. But there is no evidence that toddler software has the desired effect, and growing evidence that a high-tech childhood creates unexpected developmental and health problems.

The average child in the U.S. now spends four to five hours per day outside school sitting in front of TV and computer screens. The video habit is a major contributor to childhood obesity. In addition, the images from films, TV shows, and computers tend to overpower the child’s own budding imagination. Without imagination, the child’s play is impoverished. Yet play is a major activity through which children adjust to the world. When that is taken away, it is even harder for children to process the stress in their lives. As Richard Killingsworth of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health puts it, “Our children are raised like veal, entirely indoors.”

Moreover, many of the screen images that fill children’s lives depict scenes of appalling violence—in video games, popular movies, and the news. Exposure to such imagery exacerbates the problems of many children already suffering from too much stress. Recent studies suggest that so-called cultural toxins like pervasive media violence have now reached dangerously high levels, helping to explain the increase in school shootings, the skyrocketing use of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs, the growing problems of psychosomatic illness, rage in public places, and a general sense of cynicism and hopelessness. [9]

The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, whose research has demonstrated the profoundly intertwined workings of reason and emotion in the brain and body, writes that “children’s overexposure to violence, in real life, newscasts, or through audiovisual fiction, downgrades the value of emotions and feelings in the acquisition and deployment of adaptive social behavior. The fact that so much vicarious violence is presented without a moral framework only compounds its desensitizing action.” [10]

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in February 2001 that children under age two should not spend any time whatsoever in front of screens. Even after age two, said the Academy, young children should spend much more time engaged in direct human contact and in creative play, developing their own imaginations and experiencing life in their own way. [11]

The Ecology of Childhood

The founding partners of the Alliance for Childhood hoped that, by working together, we could bring the alarming conditions of childhood described above to greater public attention and work to find solutions with parents, teachers, physicians, and others. But we have come to realize that current practices in child rearing and education grow out of the prevailing paradigm or image of the child. If these practices are to change, then society’s view of the child must first change. Our work, therefore, must be grounded in much more than an awareness of the problems facing children today. We must re-examine and redefine our basic understanding of the nature of childhood itself.

Two Views of Childhood

A mechanistic or materialistic view of human beings reduces them to mechanical terms—the heart is a pump, the brain a computer, and the mind a software program. We are hard-wired to respond in certain ways. Such a mindset affects the way we view intelligence as well. It materializes thinking itself, and contributes to the increasing emphasis on standardized tests that can be scored by machine. Thus our measure of what it means to be educated is inexorably narrowed to what machines can deal with.

This mechanistic view sees—consciously or unconsciously—the machine as archetype. The machine comes first and gives rise to both the physical and the intellectual universe. It is as if the human being were made in the image of the machine instead of vice-versa.

It is not surprising, then, that new, more complex machines comes to be seen as equal to the natural and human and, ultimately, superior to them. Rodney Brooks, director of M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, describes in his book “Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us” the development of Kismet, “the world’s first robot that is truly sociable, that can interact with people on an equal basis.” Brooks argues that, in the near future, all of us “will become a merger between flesh and machines.” [12] It is also not surprising that some people now talk about “spiritual machines” (as in the title of Raymond Kurzweil’s 1999 book) [13] and the “theology of technology.” [14] We have literally reached the threshold of worshiping machines as the new god.

It would be far more accurate to say that a mechanical pump has certain similarities to the heart (and some significant differences, too), or that the computer is patterned on the brain and nervous system. Then we would be putting first things first.�

Looking at Children in a Broad Context

A contrasting view is represented by the phrase “ecology of childhood.” The word ecology comes from the Greek: oikos, meaning “house,” and logos, meaning “the word,” “wisdom,” or “understanding.” Thus ecology could mean the language of the home, or of the Earth, which is our home.

The science of ecology—the interrelationship of living organisms—offers many principles that are useful in our thinking about the nature and needs of children: looking at life in a broad context; the importance of diversity; the irreducible wholeness of organisms; beneficence (as in showing kindness to wild creatures); rejecting the idea of possessing or managing the biosphere; communion and harmony between humankind and nature; and a conscientious mindfulness of the danger inherent in any technological innovation that involves irreversible environmental or biological change.

Ecology looks at living creatures in a broad context, and at their interdependence. Therefore an ecological view asks how the child is affected by his physical environment, his social environment (family, friends, neighborhood), and his cultural environment (school, the arts, religious community). How do they work together to create a context for the child’s development?

Ecologist David Orr writes, in his book Earth in Mind, that “no obligations or pity are owed to machines.” [15] If we look at children as little machines, then, we “owe” them nothing, and need feel no compassion for their struggles. Rather, our approach will be simply to try to engineer them, through education, to serve the economic welfare of society. They become mere tools for furthering prosperity.

An ecological view, on the other hand, acknowledges children as living beings to whom we are obligated for their own intrinsic nature as children—not because of their potential usefulness. We then must ask: which child-rearing and educational practices will best meet their needs and establish the conditions that promote their health?

Ironically, the mechanistic and narrowly utilitarian view is also, in the long run, the least economically sound. Children who suffer from stress-related illnesses and disabilities are less likely to become productive workers or to contribute to the welfare of society in general. Children who are educated with humanistic values want to work and find joy and purpose in that work.

The medical costs of treating children—and the adults they will become—for depression, hyperactivity, autism, anxiety disorders, Type 2 diabetes, and other illnesses that are on the rise will be staggering. How much needless expense, and how much suffering, would be avoided if our guiding principle in child-rearing and education were the physician’s creed: First, do no harm.

Linear Versus Transformative Development

We must also see childhood in the context of time, for it is but one phase of a whole life. It is both a rich time of life in itself and also a foundation for what comes later. Yet the growth that is based on this foundation is not always linear, like the measurements of a child’s height and weight, or the building of a brick structure. Human growth has both linear qualities and moments of great transformation.

Certain skills seem to develop in a linear way through early childhood as children build vocabulary or master standing, walking, climbing, and running, for example. But there are also transformations more akin to the emergence of the butterfly from its cocoon. One example is when the child becomes ready for first grade. Suddenly, amidst all the changes associated with first-grade readiness that can be measured, there is a change that is much more difficult to quantify. The child who has primarily learned through imitating adults in early childhood is now ready to learn from a teacher “teaching.” The seven-year-old looks at the teacher in a whole new way, as if to say, “You know things I don’t know and you will teach me.” It is a leap into a new arena.

There is no point in trying to feed the caterpillar with the nectar that nourishes the butterfly. It is not ready for it. Nor is there any sense in giving the caterpillar lessons in flying. One has to simply create the appropriate conditions for transformation, and then wait for it to take place. The same is true for children. It is the failure of adults to recognize the nature of their transformation, and the need for time to allow it to take place, that results in our current penchant for a sped-up curriculum and for computer software for babies.

The technological orientation to education and child-rearing uses a very narrow portion of the way the world functions—and a nonliving portion at that—and applies it as a model for everything, including the way children learn and grow. The child’s actual life is part of a far more complex system of organic, inorganic, and social elements, all woven together in a rich and inseparable tapestry that needs to be both attended to and honored. To believe that we can somehow manufacture a child’s knowledge of that tapestry employing only the most reductionist aspect of it is worse than foolish. Ultimately it threatens both the child’s full development and society’s welfare.

The most fundamental values of the mechanical view of the human being—productivity, standardization, efficiency, measurability, and objectivity—when imposed on the early education process thwart the very characteristics we claim as precious to childhood: creativity, imagination, compassion, adventurousness, and individuality. To give lip service to these values while systematically imposing practices that effectively banish them from the classroom is not only hypocritical but also confusing to children. It leads eventually to the cynicism and disconnection with learning that we see in so many schools.

All of those mechanical values point in one direction: the establishment of control and the extension of power. That’s what machines allow us to do: control our environment and extend our power over it. But should control and power be the guiding principles of education?

In Growing Young, anthropologist Ashley Montagu examines childhood in the light of the evolutionary principle of neotony—the retention of fetal and juvenile traits in the adults of more highly developed species. [16] The evolutionary triumph of the human being, he argues, is our ability to retain the childlike qualities of adaptability and the capacity to learn right into and through adulthood. Our long period of development in childhood, in other words, serves an essential purpose. Trying to speed it up is both misguided and potentially disastrous.

Modern society’s approach to childhood is similar to its approach to the environment. We think that we can do anything we want and the earth will adjust. We began to wake up when Rachel Carson pointed out the link between DDT and the death of birds, and when Lake Erie became so polluted that it literally burned before our eyes. Still, we think that the earth can endlessly adapt itself to our excesses, despite warnings of global warming and melting polar caps. Likewise, we think we can do anything we want with children and they will endlessly adapt. Human beings are flexible, especially children, but they have been asked to adjust to so many unhealthy patterns that their capacity to adapt is now at risk. Just as the earth is suffering from our excesses, children are now suffering. The phrase “toxic childhood” is no longer an exaggeration.

Learning What We Are

Our preoccupation with external rather than internal development has led to our fascination with machines, mastery of masses of factual information, and technological fixes for profoundly human problems. As Parker Palmer writes in his book, The Courage to Teach, “We are obsessed with manipulating externals because we believe that they will give us some power over reality and win us some freedom from its constraints. Mesmerized by a technology that seems to have done just that, we dismiss the inward world.... That is why we train teachers to master techniques but not to engage their students’ souls.” [17]

The cellist Pablo Casals put the problem another way, strikingly relevant to the predicament we now all find ourselves in—in a world remade by terrorist attacks and fear. In his autobiography, Joys and Sorrows, Casals asked:

What do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.

Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work—we must all work—to make the world worthy of its children. [18]

The Imperatives of Childhood

Human beings now wield unprecedented power to wage war on one another and on other species—and unprecedented power to sustain life as well. How can we prepare our children for these awesome moral responsibilities? Will proficiency in technical skills alone suffice? Or will a renewed sense of reverence for and devotion to life itself be essential for humanity’s survival?

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy warned us of the challenge we face when he wrote in 2000 that “the 21^st-century technologies—genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)—are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.” [19]

Our task, then, is to educate our children in ways that develop the traits of character and habits of mind that shouldering the unprecedented moral responsibilities of a high-tech future will demand. We fail in that task if we deny the imperatives of childhood.

What are these imperatives? We have already named some of them above. In our rushed culture, many children, both rich and poor, are deprived of these essentials of a healthy childhood: close relationships with caring adults, physical activity, time to play, direct experience of nature, music and art, hands-on lessons of all kinds, and rich face-to-face experiences of language with living people, not machines.

In calling for this new understanding of the imperatives of childhood, we have spoken not only of children’s minds and bodies, but of their souls and spirits, and of the moral dimension of this work. We do so with an awareness of the deep connectedness of all things. As Sven Birkerts wrote, in The Gutenberg Elegies:

We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth—a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms. In our lateral age, living in the bureaucracies of information, we don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding. Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-freighted terms—truth, meaning, soul, destiny.... We suspect the people who use such words of being soft and nostalgic. [20]

The Alliance for Childhood is committed to exploring and promoting an ecological perspective on childhood based on our best knowledge of the real developmental and spiritual needs of the child. Grounding our work in the ecology of childhood encourages us to consider every childhood issue with the depth and the breadth it deserves. It is only in this dance of reciprocal relationships between the life of the individual child, the life of the community, and the rest of life on Earth itself that we will create a world worthy of our children.

Author’s biographical note: Edward Miller, a founding partner of the U.S. Alliance for Childhood, is an education policy researcher, writer, and consultant.� He has written or edited eight books and is former editor of the Harvard Education Letter.

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[20] Birkerts, Sven, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Winchester, Mass.: Faber & Faber, 1994.