Zsuzsanna Vajda
Childhood and How Children Live Now

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The years following the political transition saw the emergence of complete chaos and disarray in all areas of life, not least in the rearing of children. With the criticism of socialist practices, the pluralistic values of post-modern philosophy and neo-liberal ideologies received a tremendous boost. Quite a few children's institutions, which were associated with the regime only by virtue of the fact that they were established during the socialist era, have been swept away by the tide of criticism, regardless of the fact that, from the organizational and the educational viewpoints alike, they compared favourably with similar institutions in a good many of the countries of Western Europe. It should be pointed out here that, according to one of the postulates of the humanistic-phenomenological school, parents were continuously in conflict with their children throughout the history of the world, and it was only the conditions and scientific achievements of the current era that made it possible to change the situation. In a book (1990), which became extremely popular even among experts in Hungary, Thomas Gordon maintains that parents have been raising their children in a way that has practically remained unchanged for two thousand years, suggesting that it is about time that we transform the one-sided relationship into a two-sided one. In Hungary, this attitude was linked both to the criticism of the educational methods the Socialist era produced and to an idealization of "Western European methods", or what has been perceived as such. Naturally, the market was very quick to capitalize on ultra-liberal ideologies: readers were swamped by popular books, which were not subject to critical control and reflection by those involved in the professional field. The training in which these ideologies promise to change parents' or teachers' mentality, typically runs to a couple of weeks. (Gordon training is one of these ideologies.)

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We conducted the interviews in 1990 in C., a border village with a population of three thousand, tucked away somewhere in the East of the country, in one of the poorest and least advanced of the regions. This village displays a peculiar mixture of the economical and political developments of past and present.
To the question why they decided to have children, most parents reply either that it is only natural for couples to have children, or that people's, and most notably women's, lives are desolate without children, or that there is a need for progeny, as life without children would be unnatural. They all refer to the cases of couples who would do anything to conceive a child. A professional foster mother, living in a remote village, took on the care of unwanted children at the age of fifty, with her own offspring having left home by that time. When asked about her motives, she commented that, although she no longer wanted to have babies, she still felt too young to live without children.
In answering the question in what way the situation of childless couples and parents differed, curiously enough hardly anyone mentioned financial considerations. One of the mothers said that she had been taught a great many things by her children: they expanded her horizon and changed her attitude towards the main issues of life. Many people saw virtue in being forced, by having children, to take care of others. Several ostressed that the sacrifices of bringing up children were rewarded.
In general, children in Hungary stay home with their mothers until the age of three, with a minority attending crčches at the age of one or one and a half. The latter is more typical of cities and large towns. Nursing is an area where different traditions survive: I found that in C., mothers breast-feed their babies for much longer than urban mothers. A number of mothers who answered the questionnaire, breast-fed their babies until the age of one and a half or two, with one particular woman nursing her baby until the age of three. In conjunction with this, they usually lay emphasis on toilet-training, sometimes using a variety of forms of coercion.
The nursing habits of the urban middle classes are characterized by a distinctive anxiety and uncertainty, with a kind of medical approach also prominent. A benefit of the censored journalism under Socialism was that unverifiable and sensationalized information received much less publicity. In the past year various articles in high circulation national papers on cot deaths scared Hungarian mothers, providing as they did misleading information on frequency. Theories attributing great significance to the relationship between mother and foetus in the future development of the baby's personality also produced a scare, and found, especially among wealthier mothers, a ready market. (Such assumptions have not been supported by any kind of scientific evidence.) In some sense the articles on post-natal depression worked as self-fulfilling prophecies. Mothers are under pressure from the media to buy disposable nappies, vitamins, baby toilet articles in advertisements that feature people presented as doctors or other experts.
Most children between the age of three and six, over ninety per cent of them to be precise, attend kindergarden, which is part of the public education system. The children are fed three times a day, and usually return home between 4 and 6 p.m. The size of kindergarden classes is limited to a maximum of 20 children. There are two kindergarden teachers assigned to each group, and every effort is made to make sure that at least one of them stays with a group throughout the three or four years the children are there.
The final year of kindergarden operates as a pre-school. Enrollment in school proper is flexible: parents of six-year-olds who were born between May 31 and September 31 can decide in which year to start school. Under the present conditions most parents choose the later date, with the result that by the time they start school, the majority of children are closer to seven than to six.
In elementary grades, most children attend day-care schools, which means that they eat and do their homework in school. Such children, too, go home between 5 and 6 p.m. Many children as old as nine or ten are still escorted home by their parents. Among the urban population a substantial relocation has begun: the wealthier are moving from city flats to suburban houses. As a result, the children are transported to and from school by car; this was considered an exception rather than the rule even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. Predominantly the children's homework is supervised if the parents are professionals. Mathematics poses most problems for most children.
The majority of children either sleep in their own room, or share a room with one or more siblings. However, the practice of parents and children sleeping in the same room is much more frequent in this part of the world than it is in the Western half of Europe. That poverty is not to blame for the custom of sharing a bed or a room with children would already follow from the earlier mentioned survey in the Midlands of Great Britain, where even the poorest families had more than one bedroom. In Hungary the custom of sleeping together with the children survived even in large, two-story family houses. In rural areas it occasionally happens that children sleep in their parents' bed until they are of school age; then they get their own bed, but still sleep in the same room. This custom is surprisingly common in towns. Its persistence is shown by the evidence of interviews conducted in a large village near the eastern border, mentioned earlier in this paper. Foster parents also share their bedrooms with the children in their care, in one case with all five of them. The earlier quoted professional foster mother told us that it was after going to bed that they had time to have a chat with the children, talking about what had happened during the day. Television viewing habits also back the custom of sleeping in one room: the family watches together from the family bed, then falls asleep together. Another not unusual situation is that the mother sleeps with the children, while the father sleeps alone, in a separate room.
According to the evidence of interviews with children between the ages of six and nine, about sixty or seventy per cent of them tell everything, or almost everything, to their parents, primarily to their mother. Ranking first among the things they tend to be silent about are bad marks, scolding or punishment at school. However, some children in the age group of ten to twelve point out that they, too, sometimes have secrets. Most of the families have their evening meal together, which is also a chance for them to talk. Among the topics most frequently discussed at the dinner table are the problems children and parents face at school or at work, relatives, friends and money. Some of the children point out that they never talk about politics at the dinner table.
Bedtime stories are told to about half of the children who still cannot read; here the parents' level of education is a major factor. Every child watches television. At the time of the survey, the new commercial channels still did not exist; children mostly watched cartoons and series. Other surveys suggest that the major consideration of those Hungarian parents who limit the viewing habits of their children, is time, rather than content. Hungarian audiences were not prepared for the arrival of violent media products that first flooded the country in the 1980s. No one advised the parents of the possible side effects, and it was only recently that civil associations were organized to limit the screening of violent films. Often, trailers for violent action movies are shown before cartoons or family movies aimed at children.
Computers only made a marginal appearance in the interviews completed by the mid-1990s: the spread of the Internet will probably change that. In 1997 the Ministry of Culture and Education launched a giant project called Suli-net that provides state-of-the-art PCs in large numbers of secondary schools all over the country along with free lines.
Most children are punished in one way or another: primarily by scolding and a ban on watching television. Less frequently, corporal punishment is applied: forcing them to sit silent in a room or kneel on the floor, or giving them a smack on the bottom. The usual causes are fighting between siblings, arriving home late, bad marks at school and failure to tidy up their room. Children are expected to keep their room tidy as well as to help with the chores regardless of their gender. In most cases, mothers take the decisions on bringing up children: they are the ones who listen to the events of the school day, help with the homework, prepare meals, tell bedtime stories; they are also the ones who get "mad" when something happens, and also the ones who more readily resort to corporal punishment. Mothers attend parent and teacher meetings and they maintain contact with the school.
Corporal punishment is more frequent in families where the available information suggests the existence of social problems: unemployed parents, a large number of children, small living space. As is also confirmed by research in other countries, family relations very sensitively react to a decline in living standards. We are able to learn about the consequences of this problem indirectly from the children's answers: the topic of discussion at the dinner table is money in at least half the number of cases; children's greatest ambition is to have enough money to be able to take their parents on a journey. Figures reveal that one third of the children live in one-parent families. The situation of single mothers in the economic transition is especially difficult. Private businesses are the best means of securing adequate economic conditions for the family; however, even if the mother were in possession of the capital and the expertise, she would have no time or energy left for the family, for the children; if she wants to succeed financially, she has to give up much of the time that she could otherwise spend with her children.
The answers clearly indicate that children are even more depressed by the problems that seem insoluble to their parents: "What an awful world we live in!"; "Daddy is going to lose his job"; "We have no money". Other things that make children suffer the most are problems at school, fights between the parents, divorce, illnesses and death. The typical rewards children are likely to receive are praise, kisses and the occasional presents. Despite efforts by the educational community and the press, in a large number of families good marks are rewarded with money.
Christmas is the greatest holiday, when children receive especially valuable presents: a bicycle (the cheapest cost roughly as much as the current minimum monthly wage in Hungary), a pair of roller skates, expensive gear and the rest. In rural areas once frequently visited by famine, people celebrate their child's finishing secondary school by feasting, with a hundred or so guests invited and traditional food served in outrageous quantities (soup, boiled meat, breaded cutlet, stuffed cabbages, blood sausages, cakes and desserts).
Among the wealthier sections of the urban population the tendency to move from urban flats to suburban detached houses is widespread. More than ninety per cent of the better-off urban children have their own room, with forty per cent of them sleeping alone in their room. About two thirds of the children who answered the questionnaire had gone to different schools earlier, suggesting that a significant part of the families in question recently moved to their newly built houses. The formation of the so-called local community, which play such an important part in the lives of British or American schools, has not yet taken place under the existing conditions, as geographical mobility, either inter or intra-local, is relatively strong. Similarly to other parts of the world, the relationship between families in newly established communities is either non-existent or only extremely superficial. For similar reasons, personal contacts between children living in an urban environment are steadily diminishing, as well as changing in character. Since many of the children travel long distances to their secondary schools, the schoolmates often live long ways from each other. Thus, despite greatly improved housing conditions and more cars, children visit each other much less frequently than they used to do just one generation earlier. When they do come together, it usually happens either in the form of costly children's parties organized by the parents or within the scheme of a school function. Unfortunately, the latter are far and far between, as a result of the diminishing presence of schools in children's sparetime. School parties and festivities are increasingly falling victim to the deteriorating standards of public safety. (Recently a Saturday-night dance party in one of the elite high schools of Budapest was supervised by security guards all wearing black uniforms.)
In talking about their children, parents first of all tend to point out that young people today are much freer and much more independent than used to be the case a generation earlier. In the course of a survey carried out in Budapest, about one-third of parents thought that they regard knowledge and education for their own sakes as a priority for their children. Another third expected their children to be educated according to their abilities, interests and inclinations. And finally, the last third expected their children to acquire skills and knowledge that were practical and pertinent in many areas of life.
In the expectations with regard to their children's character and personal qualities, the traditional bourgeois values dominate: sincerity, uprightness, honesty, hard work. I gained the impression, unsubstantiated by data so far, that expectations differed according to social position. Lower-middle-class parents tend to lay emphasis on qualities such as compliance, friendliness and the observation of norms. The better-off parents in business stress the importance of independence and autonomous judgement.
About one-third of the parents filling out the questionnaire expressed objections to children's behaviour, either their own or of children in general, criticizing them for their alleged lack of compliance. In defence of their use of firm punishment, parents usually claim that children are not dutiful enough and do not co-operate with their parents as much as they should. When they compare the behaviour of today's children with their childhood memories, they once again emphasise greater co-operation, in the past as against a better financial situation for this generation. But parents in general do not expect their children to be obedient in all respects, taking a positive view of independence. The overwhelming majority thinks of the parent's superior position as indispensable, with many of them being also of the opinion that mutual respect between parents and children is preferable.
In many instances, the children of the nouveaux riches encounter difficulties both in studying and in making friends. The behaviour of parents, whose own education is often found wanting, reveals a duality which children find very taxing: on the one hand the parents expect their children to comply with rules they lay down for them, and on the other hand they demonstratively shower expensive clothes and consumer goods on them. In the course of the survey we interviewed a seventeen-year-old girl with a severe psychological disorder, who told us that her father made a point of demonstrating that hers was the richest family in her class. At the same time, he checked every minute of the girl's life, either with the help of a cellular phone or personally, regularly locking her up in their home and taking the key. There is another father, whose business is now growing into something of an empire, dealing in everything from travel agencies to book publishing. His three marriages provided him with children who get everything that money can buy. He has extended his generosity even to the school: he has agreed to finance a major reconstruction project. (Whether the school's acceptance of the offer was ethical is a different question altogether.) He told us that he himself owed a great deal to his old school and former teachers. He therefore expected his children to adapt to the school and to learn to accept the fact that some teachers were more likeable than others. However, his children were neither good students nor popular with their classmates. The father fails to regard this as any great tragedy: he believes that with his money and connections he will be able to create an empire which can satisfy any interest the children might develop: "If she wants a private nursery, I'll buy her one; or if she wants to work in a travel agency, that can be arranged, too," he says.

Of the mothers interviewed in village C, even the relatively younger ones (between the ages of 20 and 30) addressed their own parents in a formal manner, as did everyone else in their own generation, they told us. However, they all planned to change that, even including the mother who otherwise explained to us that motherly love had nothing to do with the formal manner of address. Regardless of all this, however, it was precisely in contrast to this treatment that they tried to formulate their own ideas on bringing up children, at least in part. They were unanimous in the hope that they would have a closer relationship with their own offspring. One mother in particular was very keen on making sure that her children were not afraid of her. Another young mother in her twenties especially resented the fact that she had received no sex education at all, while her mother had been worried sick of the possibility that her daughter might get pregnant, never letting her go out at night even when she was well into her teens. According to the older mothers, those aged between 40 and 50, girls should not be allowed to go out with boys; instead, the proper form of courting required boys to visit the girls at home. Even in the late eighties, more girls got married straight after leaving secondary school in that village than their coevals in towns; yet those girls who, instead of getting married, continued their studies and tried to lead an independent life, attracted less pre-judice.
In continuation of the tradition established in East Central Europe by the extended families in a peasant economy, parents are involved in the lives of their children even after the latter had started their own families. It is a generally accepted practice that parents provide for their children's start in married life: the custom in the village in question requires, for example, that the parents of one party buy the house and those of the other party supply the furniture. The grand- parents very often take an active part in child rearing.
In the village, grandmothers have often enjoyed the respect of their married daughters. The young mothers told us that their own mothers often criticized their child care habits. It is not unusual for child-care to be divided between the young parents and the grandparents: the children often sleep over at their grandparent's place, feeling quite at home in both houses.
The young mothers resort to the grandparents' help in towns, too; the grandmothers-to-be often time their retirement so that they can help with the grandchildren. It is frequently observed—even in towns—that the grandmother moves to her daughter's place for a few weeks after a birth, or that she visits her every day. The traditional involvement of grandmothers perhaps explains the fact that fathers in Hungary play a lesser role in bringing up children, especially while they are small. However, the fathers' involvement is further limited by the fact that they work extremely long hours. Even during the Socialist days, the fear of losing social standing forced men to have a second job, or to work at home, in the garden or in a small workshop. This pressure has not been eliminated after the political changes: in the overwhelming majority of cases, maintaining acceptable living standards can only be done at the expense of working tremendously long hours. What has stopped is the practice of fathers working in the capital—a distance of 250 kilometres—and coming home for weekends (and not necessarily every weekend.) That used to mean considerable sacrifices and risked the harmonious life of the family. But with an end to this commuting, people's regular income and security also vanished. The majority of the men were unemployed at the time of conducting the survey: their only source of income outside the dole was connected with trading across the border, usually illegally.
Fashion and the requirements of the new age appear in people's thinking and decisions in strange ways. A young mother of twin girls, a skilled worker, wanted to move to the town mainly because she heard that children in the town's nursery schools could learn foreign languages there. And if that was not possible, she would be prepared to teach her children to speak a foreign language herself, with the help of tapes and books, she claims. The only hitch is that neither she nor her husband speak any foreign language.
Recently it has become something of a fad in C. to give exotic, foreign-sounding names to children, with the result that the old custom of naming children after their parents or close relatives has steadily declined. For example, within a short period two girls were named Amanda in the village, a name unheard of in Hungary before; this is a trend that can be observed up and down in the country, with even the smallest hamlets resounding with names such as Nikolett, Krisztián and Timea. The wealthier parents get the most expensive prams money can buy, even in those villages where the conditions of the footpaths are utterly unsuitable for them, not to mention the fact that they are not essential for airing the babies; people also tend to dress toddlers for the sand-box in expensive and flashy clothes.
The observations presented here do not lend themselves to a summary conclusion. Perhaps they will contribute to a more vivid and more comprehensible picture of the everyday life of children in a country going through sweeping changes for a century or more.

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Zsuzsanna Vajda ,
is Head of the Department of Psychology at the József Attila University, Szeged.