“RAISE UP A CHILD"

Edith V.P. Hudley, Wendy Haight, and Peggy Miller

Train up a child in the way he should go: and
when he is old, he will not depart from it.
—Proverbs, 22:6 (King James version)

I KNOW the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were NOT there, and haven’t made it yet. Your grandmother was also there. . . . I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn’t hard to find.
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
(emphasis in the original)

The individuals who are part of that beloved community are already in our lives. We do not need to search for them. We can start where we are. We begin our journey with love, and love will always bring us back to where we started.
—bell hooks, Salvation

PREFACE

When we first met Edith Hudley, we were struck by her passionate commitment to children and her ceaseless storytelling. Two intertwined desires animate Mrs. Hudley: to raise up children in the way they should go (to paraphrase her favorite passage from the book of Proverbs) and to bear witness to the lessons learned from a lifetime of caring for children. As developmental psychologists with an interest in narrative, we were fascinated.

Once we got to know her better, we realized that her life story is especially timely, given the currents that are reshaping the field of human development. Scholars and practitioners are more aware than ever that human development cannot be reduced to a single trajectory, that different social and cultural conditions create a multiplicity of developmental experiences for children. As the world grows smaller and local communities grow more ethnically and culturally diverse, there is heightened interest in building a foundation of knowledge that is deeply pluralistic.

The impetus for these changes comes from theoretical advances within developmental psychology and allied fields. And it comes from the changing nature and needs of the constituencies who enroll in human development courses: the increasingly diverse college student population, many of whom will become parents in the not too distant future, and the aspiring practitioners—social workers, teachers, clinicians—who want to be better informed about differences so that they can better support children’s development.

How can we as teachers of human development adapt to these changes? What can we do to offer our students in the fields of social work, education, and psychology a more inclusive understanding of how people develop?

Scholars have responded to these questions by revamping their lectures to include research from a broader range of cultures and communities. They capitalize on the diversity in their classrooms by inviting students to reflect on their own upbringing and by encouraging them to listen to one another across the boundaries of culture, race, gender, and class. They use textbooks that weave findings from different groups into the discussion of standard topics and include “sidebars” that take up issues germane to particular groups.

All of these innovations help. And yet we often feel dissatisfied with our efforts to diversify the material that we teach: a glimpse of African-American families, a snapshot of Chinese classrooms, a gesture toward ethnic identity, dwarfed by the discussions of self-concept, self-esteem, and personal identity. These additions feel piecemeal, haphazard, and peripheral to a substantive core that remains stubbornly mainstream. Where are the in-depth treatments of other ways of life that would stir students’ imaginations? What could be done to encourage students to recognize the cultural nature of their own experiences and to enter vicariously into other people’s experiences?

This is why we need Edith Hudley. As James Baldwin said of another grandmother, she was there. We can check with her if we want to learn about the conditions that shaped her life and the lives of her offspring. Her story, presented and responded to in the pages that follow, offers readers the opportunity for sustained engagement with her world. It is a world in which children’s experience and parents’ child-rearing practices are inflected through African-American and Christian systems of meaning. Although her story is autobiographical, encompassing the whole sweep of her life, it is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. It is instead a life story or oral history, which is to say, a set of stories told orally and subsequently translated into written form by us, her coauthors.

Mrs. Hudley’s story is considerably longer than the research reports that we have offered our students in the past. However, length is not really the point. The pedagogical value of her contribution lies in its narrative power. Often narrative is thought to mirror an external reality. From this vantage point, Edith Hudley’s story provides a window into historical events—what was it like to grow up in rural Texas in the pre–Civil Rights era?—or subjective experiences—how did she cope with the loss of her mother?

But this reflective view does not do justice to narrative as a creative act. Conjuring trumps reporting for Mrs. Hudley, as for all master storytellers. She crafts scenes and populates them with living, breathing people. She mounts arguments and orchestrates perspectives and personas. Before long, readers find themselves inhabiting these scenes, hearing these voices, imagining these ways of raising children. And they come to know Edith Hudley herself, who she is and has been and what she stands for. We hope that these encounters will move readers to enter into a conversation with her about how to cultivate children’s development.

Acknowledgments

Many people have had a hand in bringing this book to fruition, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here. Barbara Bowman, Jean Briggs, Suzanne Gaskins, Artin Goncu, Randolph Potts, Julian Rappaport, Jill Kagle, and Joseph Tobin discussed the project with us at various points along the way or provided feedback on early drafts. We appreciate their careful reading, incisive criticism, and generosity. We are also grateful to our colleagues in the Language and Culture Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, especially Michele Koven, Daena Goldsmith, Janet Keller, and Irene Koshik for their encouragement and their constructive criticism of portions of the book.

Carl Johnson, Edward Taylor, and Karen Wyche served as formal reviewers of the manuscript. Their commentary was invaluable: comprehensive, penetrating, and sympathetic.

We began to write this book in 1998–1999 when Peggy Miller was on sabbatical from the Departments of Speech Communication and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and we completed the final revisions in 2001–2002 during Wendy Haight’s sabbatical from the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The initial draft of the introduction was written while Miller was in residence at The Poet’s House in New Harmony, Indiana, in the spring of 1999. During her sabbatical year, Haight was a visitor at Brigham Young University, where she benefited from many thoughtful discussions with psychology faculty, especially Erin Bigler, and generous access to excellent facilities. We gratefully acknowledge the support of these institutions.

We thank Cindy Workman for her meticulous transcription of the audio recordings of Edith Hudley’s stories, Dorothy Anderson for her expert copyediting, and Susana Vazquez-Weigel, who provided able and cheerful assistance with every phase in the production of the manuscript.

Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to David Follmer for his unstinting support of this book and for his patience. We especially appreciate David as a creative thinker. In his role as publisher he seeks out and embraces innovative, interdisciplinary projects, and we have been the beneficiaries.