Notwithstanding my disagreement with Galbraith’s reading of The Polar Express, I was fascinated by the rest of her article. Here are a few responses.

I admire and agree with Galbraith’s interest not in “an apocryphal ‘child reader’ but on different ‘children’ in the literary transaction who can be approached as individual beings who have left a verbal and artistic trail that can be studied: individual child characters, the unique childhood of the author, and the unique childhood of the critic” (200). I feel rather strongly that children are just as diverse in temperament and interests as adults. Is the child innocent or not-so-innocent, whatever that means? It depends on the child.

Gratefully accepting Galbraith’s license to reflect on my own childhood, I vividly recall my disdain for the philistine tastes and preferences of other children my age; I also remember frequently thinking that many of my classmates were jerks, prone to bizarre, obnoxious behavior that my mother explained as “negative attention-getting.” Nothing made me more indignant than an adult’s assumption that I shared the primitive tastes of others my age, or that I failed to notice and feel appalled at other children’s antisocial behavior. I guess I was an uptight kid. I cringed at adults’ presumptuous statements of “kids like this” and “kids think that,” statements that seemed to explicitly deny me individuality and subjectivity (though I didn’t know the word for it then). I felt that adults that insisted on such essentializing dogmas did so because they were philistines themselves as children and had somehow managed to reach adulthood without noticing anything beyond their hopelessly limited perspectives. Or perhaps they did know better, but nevertheless insisted that “kids are all the same” for the sake of convenience and the blissful intellectual laziness of categorical, black-and-white thinking.

My indignance must have abated when I was finally old enough to escape feeling personally implicated by such statements because I haven’t thought about these outrages for a long time. Until recently, in fact, I had tended to lump young people together in that noisy, messy, tedious category of kiddies—squalling, Raffi-listening, Barney-loving monsters—without allowing for outliers and for the diversity of temperament of which I was so keenly aware as a young person myself. It’s so easy to view children this way.

But while my own assumptions might have been intellectually lazy indeed, I may have judged the essentializing parents and teachers too harshly in light of the deeply-ingrained social orders that render authentically individualized treatment of children much easier said than done. Hopefully, sometime in the future we will enjoy a sufficiently safe society that children will not have to be incessantly guarded, supervised, and surveilled, and therefore constantly lumped together to facilitate such policing, but as it is, child-rearing resources are limited and efficiency is premium. Children who all like the same things and think the same way are much more efficiently managed, like an obedient hive, than a collective of distinct, individual young people. I say this not to defend conventional western child-rearing practices, but to direct the blame for them towards the socioeconomic structures that impede more individualized, emancipatory practices.

In other words, I agree with Galbraith, and I believe (yes, the bell rings for me!) in the potential of “adults transforming themselves and their own practices” (Galbraith’s emphasis) instead of trying “to mold children through training them” (188). But even though we and Galbraith are talking about methodological approaches to children’s literature rather than clinical, “real-world” applications of psychological methods, I feel compelled to point out the extraordinary impediments to attachment parenting in western culture. I’ve only recently noticed this phenomenon, and I’m so dismayed by it, I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment. Parents cannot take their young children to work (they really, really can’t, no matter what their jobs are), and—in the vast majority of cases—work they must, every day and all day. On-site child-care is a nonexistent unless you are one of the lucky few employed at an uber-progressive start-up or university, and even then, chances are very slim that the option will be available. The result is a widespread, daily routine of unpreventable, extended attachment breaks for the vast majority of young children. After reading Galbraith’s article and a bit of Alice Miller’s work, I find this state of affairs really alarming.

Social structures also frustrate parental attempts of “transforming themselves and their own practices” in even more subtle, insidious ways. I had terrible insomnia throughout my preschool to school-aged years, and I vividly recall the nightly despair of lying awake in the dark for hours, trying to remember movies I’d watched scene by scene and playing bizarre games in my head because, like all children, I wasn’t allowed to just turn the light on and read like normal adults do. Bedtime and child resistance to it is so ingrained and normalized that the bitter, one-note comedy of Go the Fuck to Sleep has made it a beloved bestseller. Go the Fuck to Sleep reinforces the hegemony of bedtime instead of questioning it, but it also offers sympathy for the problem of alternatives to enforced sleep habits, particularly when those parents must also “transform themselves and their own practices” to satisfy the demands of contemporary capitalist western society. In a better world, parents could decide to open their rag-and-bottle shops late if they’ve been up all night with the baby, but in this world, parents must clock into their jobs at an exact time without exception and must perform those jobs with such robotic consistency that the rest of their lives, including their children’s sleeping habits, must be arranged to enable parents’ capacities to satisfy the expectations of corporate employers (who are, in turn, legally obligated to arrange their companies to maximize shareholder profits, not employee well-being). In other words, the parents have to sleep so they can function well as employees, and therefore insomniac children must lie awake in the dark wondering why their individual, biological needs are so painfully ill-matched to their inescapable circumstances.

I have great parents, but childhood is hell even under the best of circumstances. Bad things—things we would find utterly intolerable and unfairly punitive as adults—are constantly happening to children to the point that this “badness” (to take a word from a certain special French child) can be understood as a fixed expectation in a child’s daily life. Frustration, disappointment, and a veritable carnival of irritations and harassments are constant in the lives of children. Children’s desires are routinely denied for many good reasons, but children also must constantly cope with conflicts between their natural urges and whatever they are being forced to do. I will venture to say that adults have a lot of little habits that contribute to their well-being which are forbidden to children. If we really need the cookie, and are going to lose our minds if we don’t eat the cookie, as adults, we can just eat the cookie and get on with our lives; kids can’t, and therefore lose their minds. If we are in some uncomfortable situation where we truly cannot stand the way people around us smell and look at us, we can usually make our excuses and flee, but children are trapped. If we’re hot, we, as adults, can take our jackets off, but babies cannot, and have no way to articulate their discomfort, and no guarantee that their needs would be met even if they could express them. My own memories of such childhood frustrations awaken my empathy in ways that otherwise stay dormant when I feel tormented by a screaming baby on the subway, for instance.

I grant that my current memory of these childhood experiences are probably contaminated by innumerable presentist distortions, but they might also be perfectly accurate, and I’m grateful to Galbraith for acknowledging the revelatory potential of considering one’s own first-person, subjective experience of childhood. If I automatically dismissed these kinds of personal reflections as distorted to the point of zero value, I would shut down consideration of a view of childhood with emancipatory potential. We can easily critique humanist disregard for categorical differences as its own form of oppression in its denial of real alterity, but attempts to identify with the Other’s first-person, subjective experience—empathy across categorical boundaries—can expedite movements in the direction of emancipation. Insisting that emancipation is only possible when the oppressed can speak for themselves dooms babies and young children, animals, and those without language to their present conditions. Insisting on the unknowable alterity of the very young and the universal fallibility of childhood memories entrenches the status quo and shuts down inquisitive, open dialogue between children and adults. I love Galbraith’s characterization of indirect approaches to formulating childhood experience, including episodic memory and revisiting one’s own subject position in childhood, as “fingers pointing to the moon,” but not “the moon itself.” That seems like a really good start.

I think I’ll stop here, but to summarize: I’m quite persuaded by Galbraith’s support of Miller and deMause (among others) and their psychohistorical analysis of the causative link between normalized early childhood parenting practices and adult atrocities. I also agree with the contention that children’s literature presents “SELVES [why does she capitalize this?] in predicaments from epistemological perspectives unavailable to ordinary interaction, but resonant with our own vulnerability as embodied creatures” and therefore that children’s literary criticism is a valuable indirect means of accessing childhood experience, particularly if the individualities of all involved (readers, authors, critics, characters) are taken into account (193). Legitimizing the attempt to access one’s own childhood experience seems to offer more emancipatory potential than the “’brashly accepted helplessness’” of foreclosing the possible accessibility of childhood memories. At the very least, validating such reflection offers more chance for empathy for the children’s suffering in the yoke of normalized child-rearing practices, and little risk of making things worse considering the inherently dependent relationship of children on adults. But actually preventing Hitlers and Bartsches from continuing to sprout up requires attention to the structural impediments to emancipatory practices, and these arise from western capitalist society’s deeply rooted ideas about professionalism and its belief in the need to sequester young children and parenting modes altogether from the world of professional work. Fortunately, such considerations are also a job for literary scholars, among (many) others.