James Agee weighs in on parenting

I thought I remembered James Agee writing something interesting about child-rearing in a movie review, and I've found it:

Lost Angel undertakes one of the few dramatic subjects worth a second thought: the bringing-up of a child. The child, who is, with occasional skids, very poignantly played by Margaret O'Brien, is a foundling whom a set of psychologists adopt, name Alpha, and do their worst with. By the time she is six she is an air-conditioned genius. Then a newspaper reporter flicks a wild card into her deck. For the first time she hears of, and experiences, the possibilities of the irrational, the irregular, the inexplicable, the magical. For the first time she becomes aware of love, and suffers it. Moral: Never trust your own, or anybody's, intelligence about a child; love is all that really matters.

There are grimly misleading and mismanaged things about this picture. Much as I mistrust the run of child-psychologists and progressive educators, I don't like to see it implied, even in myth, that they are unaware of the indispensable importance, to a child, of parental love or the best available substitute. They are likely to militate against and fruitful love far more frighteningly through the antiseptic, utilitarian, neo-pietistic quality of their recognition than through ignorance. It is unlikely, too, that a child under their seal would see the city, or meet another child, for the first time only after running away from them. Rather, the child would be so hermetically "well-adjusted," so thoroughly anaesthetized, to both that a naked realization of either would be one of its gravest difficulties.

...And I don't like at all such needless complications as the gunman who is tossed in for New Yorkerish laughs, or the general unimaginativeness through which "magic" is shown the child by means of the remarkable things of a city street at night—sandwichmen with neon shirtfronts, etc.—rather than the unremarkable. Almost anything, in such contexts of childhood, can seem miraculous; and through the child's eyes and mind the wonder of a city, which is intrinsic in a well-used camera anyhow, could have been shown many people, instead of the easily glamorous mist, a pipe-smoking dog, some Chinese, a night club, and similar easy outs; and could have become one of the most beautiful sequences I can imagine. But barring a brief examination of a popcorn machine, that chance is forfeited. —January 15, 1944