Derick Liu
3/4/14

As a Psychology major, the most interesting and surprising section of the reading has to be the short anecdote regarding the Dutch children found at the start of chapter five. It mentions the differences between children of Dutch heritage and the children of Puritan society. Usually, when I hear the term Puritan, I think of incredibly strict rules and relatively unhappy faces dressed in dreary and depressing clothes; I assumed that Puritan children didn’t get to experience much fun. According to Shorto, I’m not too far off. Puritans, constantly in fear of the devil, would raise their children strictly, making sure they were kept on tight leashes. The Dutch, however, were carefree and were not afraid to spoil their children with hugs and play time.

It’s really interesting to me because The societies really exemplify two different parenting styles, as described in developmental psychology. The Puritan style seems to fit the authoritarian style of parenting. This style is a low warmth (love) and high control (strict) form of parenting; it is also the style that has the highest chance of causing psychological problems to develop as the child grows. The Dutch seem to fit the authoritative style, which means high warmth, with an understandable amount of control – the best developmental parenting style.

The main reason I found this excerpt so interesting is because of the quote, “Children should not be kept on too tight a rein, but allowed to exercise their childishness, so we do not burden their fragile nature with heavy things.” (94). This was spoken by Johan van Beverwijck, a physician who lived during the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century. His statement summarizes the claim of cevelopmental parenting almost perfectly, but Developmental Psychology had yet to be formed. In fact, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the ones credited for laying the foundations of Developmental Psychology as a field, but they came decades after Johan. It was just very fascinating to find a reference to my field of study/interest that also suggests that the field had been developing even before the two people, who are usually cited as the fathers of said field,  were born.