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Lasch on Family Life

John Fea   |  June 16, 2009 Leave a Comment

Can you tell that I have been on a bit of a Christopher Lasch kick lately? In light of my previous post about the family and capitalism, I now offer to my readers one of the best paradigms for family life I have ever read from an academic. It comes from p. 32 of The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics.

We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of “significant others.” A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; non-stop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing children and adults–that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools; we knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by–joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship–they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the “nuclear family,” Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit.

This is great stuff, but I can’t help wondering when Lasch had time to write all those books! He continues:

None of this was thought out subconsciously as a pedagogical program, and it would have destroyed trust and spontaneity if it had been; but some such feelings, I believed, helped to shape the way we lived, along with much else that was not only thought out but purely repulsive. Like all parents, we gave our young less than they deserved. At least we did not set out to raise a generation of perfect children, however, as many middle-aged parents are trying to do today; nor did we undertake to equip them with all the advantages required by the prevailing standards of worldly achievement. Our failure to educate them for success was the one way in which we did not fail them–our one unambiguous success. Not that this was deliberate either; it was only gradually that it became clear to me that none of my own children, having been raised not for upward mobility but for honest work, could reasonably hope for any conventional kind of success…

 

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The Dancing Children of Stalingrad LONG FORM: Frederick Douglass and the Challenge of Seeing Clearly

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Christopher Lasch, family

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