Childhood in America

If it's okay I would like to go back a couple weeks to discuss Richard deCordova's chapter: "Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, The Hays Office, and Saturday Matinees." I bring this up because I have some comments about the subject of childhood and American cinema that went unmentioned. A great deal of the chapter discusses the new found need of the 1910s and 1920s to stop turning children into adults and keep them as children. We should focus a little more on why this need existed and, to a large extent, still does. Protecting childhood is primarily based on the ideal that children are "innocent." Adults construct childhood based on the idea that children are innocent of painful and complicated realities of the world. It's not enough to be innocent; children need to be innocent… of something. Those things are usually: sex, politics, and history.

It also needs to be noted that this mentality about childhood doesn't only exist off-screen. It also exists on-screen. How many films have you seen about children who end up in mysterious worlds? THE WIZARD OF OZ, PETER PAN, ALICE IN WONDERLAND… just to name a few, all involve children who find themselves in worlds run by fantasy. Fantasy reflects the idea of a separate world for children to exist in. Any adults who are present in these stories are there because they existed in these worlds from the start. No adults from the real world get to visit them. Even in E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, Elliott tells Gertie not to talk to their mother about E.T. because "adults can't see him, only little kids can." Of course the adults can literally see E.T. but they don't know how to help him. The children have to do that. With all of these stories comes the same resolution: going back home. Any time children visit a magical world they have to return home. Eliot has to say goodbye to E.T.
As much as adults wanted to create a separate world for childhood, they had to make sure it was kept in watch. To do otherwise might run the risk of "losing" their children.

So, why all the separation? The concept of childhood is not only a matter of how we see children; it is also a matter of how we see ourselves as adults. Believing that children are innocent reaffirms our status as adults of fully realized consciousness and awareness. If children cease to be well defined, and prove their lack of innocence by exhibiting traits that are believed to be restricted to adults, than that brings our idea of ourselves as mature adults into question.

Jason Feldstein