Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Permissive Childrearing and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Part One)
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I have described my current book project as “my second childhood book,” since it is the second book I have produced about children (following The Children’s Culture Reader) and since it involves a return to core texts which helped to define my own childhood growing up in America in the 1960s. I started this book more than twenty years ago but life got in the way and in any case, I am much better situated to write this book now than I could have then.
I am roughly half-way through writing it, so it is still several years away, but I wanted to share a bit of a sneak peak with readers this week, hoping to solicit some feedback on the core argument I am making about a paradigm shift in how different generations understood the role of parenting.
Here, I am painting with broad strokes but my research has found the roots of permissive parenting in the progressive era and the work of the Child Study movement, led by mothers and female researchers who formed an alliance to try to reform and reimagine the American family. I hope to share some other bits of this work in progress as the writing takes shape.
This segment comes at the end of the introduction and as its title suggests, explores the ways competing ideas about parenting run through Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) which as it happens is the first film I remember seeing in a cinema.
Just a Spoonful of Suger
Across this book, my approach is to situate some of the most popular children’s fictions of the era in relation to the debates around child development and psychology that preoccupied my parent’s generation, seeing the first as implicitly and in some cases explicitly addressing the concerns of the later. What advice, for example, would Dr. Spock have given to the parents of Dennis the Menace or how might Margaret Mead made sense of the imaginary worlds depicted by Dr. Seuss?
By children’s fictions, I mean fictions for and about the nature of childhood regardless of the medium through which they are told. I am suggesting some vital connections between these two expressions of ideal parenting and childhood. These links may or may not have been fully understood by the works’ creators. In some cases, there was direct contact between child-rearing advocates and children’s media-makers; they shared the same publications; they worked in the same organizations, and in some cases, the creators actively participated in the child study movement and shaped their works to reflect pedagogical insights. Yet, even here, keep in mind the various agents who process such works between their site of creation and their site of reception. Margaret Mead (1954b) makes a similar point in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, where she describes an experiment -- “Modern Children’s Stories”-- which sought to create a children’s book to reflect insights from the Child Study movement:
It became increasingly clear that, after all, five-year-old children don’t buy books and that the children’s needs or preferences had to be mediated by layers of other people -- mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, librarians, publishers, bookstore buyers, experts -- all of whom had a full quota of fears and hope and a much more substantial quota of firmly entrenched values and prejudices than the children for whom the story had been designed …. The cultural process by which artists and writers, sensitive to changing values, prefigure those values in their work and the guardians of public taste and morals accept and reject what they produce had proved to be too complex and sensitive for such self-conscious activity. (455).
This is what Jacqueline Rose (1984) described as the “impossibility” of children’s fiction -- such works tell us far more about adults, their values, their aspirations, their emotional needs, than such stories tell us about children’s actual experiences.
Just as child-rearing advice needs to negotiate the transition from prewar and postwar paradigms, the creators of children’s fiction similarly had to negotiate around the persistence of genre conventions, the assumptions of gatekeepers, and the biases and tastes of parents and grandparents. Consequently, we can assume that there will be residual elements at play in even the most progressive children’s texts -- some nostalgic tug towards earlier versions of proper parenting and idealized childhood. At the same time, the works discussed here made it through all of those filters and into many American households, showing some “fit” with the values with which parents were raising their children.
Childhood in Contemporary Cultures models how cultural analysis might address such problems. Mead and Wolfenstein (1954) explain, “Songs and stories, pictures, dances, and theatrical shows are among the gifts which a child may receive from his culture.” (231) These works are ways that the culture transmits its most cherished values to the next generation. These texts tell children how adults view them, how they are meant to behave, what risks and opportunities the world offers them, and how they should feel about their circumstances. These “gifts” in many cases are literal -- these materials are things adults offer to children as treats or rewards, or at best, they are options that adults tolerate. Often, also, these are media that adults consume along with their children in the case of film and television and even works that parents read to their children in the case of chapter and picture books.
In her essay, “The Image of the Child in Contemporary Films,” Wolfenstein (1954) argues that consequently, media representations of childhood “embody a complex mixture of fantasy and reality… memories and dreams of adults about their own lost childhood, as well as feelings about those mysterious beings, their own children.” (277) If permissive parents no longer believed they could “produce” children according to their own specifications, they did hope to “shape” childhood through the cultural materials they provided to their children.
Though she was writing several years before, Wolfenstein might easily have been describing the emotional trajectory of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964). P. L. Travers’ original novel was published in 1934, the film is set in 1910, but in fact, Disney’s movie, from start to finish, pits permissive ideas about child-rearing against more discipline-centered approaches, offering a model for a thoroughly modern upbringing. If the story, as a recent film reminded us, centers around “saving Mr. Banks,” what he must be saved from are out-dated concepts about child development (which are extensions of his ideas about work that leave him cut off from his own family).
John Watson would certainly recognize the problems the characters confront at the opening of the story, where Mr. Banks advertises in the London Times in order to replace yet another Nanny. Writing in 1928, Watson acknowledges:
Nurses are the weakest link in infant culture today. They are untrained, green and poorly mannered. They are either bullies or sentimentalists. It is no unusual thing for a home to have a succession of five nurses per year -- nor for a child to have had from 25-40 nurses and governesses from birth to 12 years of age. (147)
The Disney film establishes two very different sets of criteria by which a Nanny might be selected, the first “requirements” coming from Mr. Banks and the other, a contract of sorts by which the Banks’ children describe what they need and how they might curve their misconduct if they receive fair and just treatment. No such scene exists in the original novel. There, we only learn:
Mr. Banks went off with his black bag, and Mrs. Banks went into the drawing-room and sat there all day long writing letters to the papers and begging them to send some Nannies to her at once as she was waiting; and upstairs in the Nursery, Jane and Michael watched at the window and wondered who would come. They were glad Katie Nanna had gone, for they had never liked her. She was old and fat and smelt of Barley-water. (4-5)
To understand the contrast between the two approaches as represented in the Disney film, it might be helpful to consider a chart the child psychologist, Rudolf Dreikurs offered in his book, Children: The Challenge, published in 1964, the same year Disney’s Mary Poppins was released. Here, he maps the difference between two competing paradigms.
Autocratic Society **********************************Democratic Society
Authority Figure *******************************Knowledgeable Leader
Power ********************************* Influence
Pressure ********************************* Stimulation
Demanding ********************************* Winning Cooperation
Punishment ********************************* Logical consequences
Reward ********************************* Encouragement
Imposition **************************** Permit -- Self-determination
Domination ********************************* Guidance
Children Seen, Not Heard ********************* Listen! Respect the child
Because I Said To *************************** Because it is Necessary
Now, consider the ways Mr. Banks describes his ideal candidate.
Required. Nanny. Firm, Respectable, No nonsense.
A British nanny must be a gen'ral!
The future empire lies within her hands
And so the person that we need to mold the breed
Is a nanny who can give commands!
A british bank is run with precision;
a british home requires nothing less!
Tradition,discipline, and rules must be the tools,
Without them,disorder,chaos,moral disintegration;
In short you have a ghastly mess!
Here, and throughout the rest of the song, the key words and concepts -- “precision”, “firmness,” “discipline,” “rules” on the one hand and disorder and moral disintegration on the other -- come directly from the discipline-centered child-rearing advice of the early 20th century. Ada Hart Arlitt’s The Child From One to Six (1930) warned that the child “will not know that there are laws that govern the universe unless he knows that there are laws that govern the home.” The home was to be regulated not by “mother love” but by the “kitchen time-piece.” Here, we speak to a core concern of the behaviorist model: the idea that children should be fed and put to bed on a fixed schedule rather than giving over to their demands or desires.
Elsewhere, in the film, Mr. Banks sings, “It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion Are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed.” The central metaphors running through the prewar discourse emphasize industrial (Or in Bank’s case, commercial) processes. For John Watson, the home was to be run like a taylorized factory. Mr. Banks sums up his desire to prepare children for the competitive environment of British capitalism: “The children must be molded,shaped and taught/ That life's a looming battle to be faced and fought.”
As in the pre-war models, the best methods for achieving these goals required the father to be the head of the household and for those under his “command” to maintain authority over the young. Like Watson, going hand in hand with this emphasis on patriarchal power within the home is a distrust of maternal sentimentality or what Banks refers to as “the slipshod, sugery, female thinking they get around here all day long.” Banks is portrayed as seeking a polite distance from his children: “I'll pat them on the head And send them off to bed.” Here, Banks follows Watson’s advice on such matters:
“There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults… Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.” (82)
The children’s advertisement represents a profoundly different model of the relations between children and adults:
If you want this choice position
Have a cheery disposition
Rosy cheeks, no warts!
Play games, all sorts
You must be kind, you must be witty
Very sweet and fairly pretty
Take us on outings, give us treats
Sing songs, bring sweets
Never be cross or cruel
Never give us castor oil or gruel
Love us as a son and daughter
And never smell of barley water
The conversation between parents and children models something closer to the family council Dreikurs (1964) describes: “Each member has the right to bring up a problem. Each has the right to be heard. Together, all seek for a solution to the problem and the majority opinion is upheld.” (301) The children assume that they have the right to contribute to solving the problem and that their insights will be helpful to the adults.The children’s attempt to assert their voice in the process is only heard because their mother insists that the parents should listen to what they have to say.
The children’s criteria emphasize an affectionate relationship, the opposite of the anti-sentimentalist approach advocated by Watson and Mr. Banks. If Banks wants a nanny who can give commands, they want one with a “cheery disposition.” She is defined by the ways that she engages with them through jokes, songs, outings, and games, and not through the expectations she places upon them. She is to win their cooperation through what she permits and the guidance she offers. And as if to dramatize this process of winning cooperation, the next verse functions as a negotiation in which the children agree not to misbehave if the nanny agrees to better respond to their needs.
If you won't scold and dominate us
We will never give you a cause to hate us
We won't hide your spectacles
So you can't see
Put toads in your bed
Or pepper in your tea
Here, they hint at some of the pranks that led Katie Nana to flee in horror, describing the Banks children as “little beasts” who need a “ruddy zookeeper.” Instead, they suggest that the nanny’s discipline-centered approach provoked them to act out, a perspective shared by many permissive child-rearing experts. Mr. Banks rejects such values outright, tearing up the children’s advertisement and tossing the bits in the chimney. But when Mary Poppins arrives, she is holding the children’s advert, taped together, much to Mr. Bank’s bafflement and confusion. Her arrival represents an experiment in how a more permissive household might operate.
