On the Pedagogical Significance of Children's Experience of Secrecy

Secrecy Research Project

(this outline was formulated in 1994)

What is the meaning of secrets in children's lives? Do all children, young and old, experience secrecy? Can secrets be a positive phenomenon in children's lives and growth? Or are secrets just unhealthy barriers that prevent people from being truly open and communicative with each other? What is the moral significance of secrets? How do children experience secrecy anyway?

It is likely that the experience of secrecy plays a crucial role in the formative experience of identity. Early childhood experiences of secrecy are intimately tied up with the emergence of self-identity. Flitner and Valtin (1984/87) attempted to determine some stage-specific characteristics of the psychology of secrecy in children's cognitive development. Flitner and Valtin found that the concept of secrecy undergoes radical changes in children from five to twelve years of age. With very young children the concept of secrecy is tied up with the sense of self. By the time children reach twelve years of age the secret is connected with the norm of friendship.

Wonder and doubt about the question whether a secret should be divulged is only common among six to ten year olds. Ten year old children tend to orient themselves to norms of friendship. Once children are twelve the obligation to keep a secret becomes absolute. And to betray someone's secret would mean to lose this person's friendship. Older children have no longer interest in “nice secrets”. Secrecy is completely tied up with that what is forbidden. And even dangerous things must be kept secret. Thus, as the child gets older fear and punishment become the most important motives for the code of secrecy. By the time the child has turned twelve, the norms of secrecy completely coincide with the boundary of the circle of friends. They thrive on external pressure.

What is the meaning and significance of children keeping secrets from their parents? Very young children seem to share every thought, every impulse that seems to occur to them. They tend to respond freely and openly to their parents questions and communications. But as children grow older it is not unusual that suddenly they begin to feel protective about their inner thoughts and feelings. Now they may turn resentful about the questions that parents ask in all sincerety. Suddenly the child experiences the questions as if the parents were prying for things . This is, in a way, a new experience for the child: to know something that his or her father or mother does not even know, to possess something for oneself alone! Thus, there is even a certain sense of power associated with keeping a secret from the parents, who are for the young child so all powerful and all-knowing.

To have a secret gives the child a feeling of personal identity of inner-self. In the experience of secrecy children discover inwardness, privacy, inner invisibility. When something is hidden or kept secret from someone then “self” is concealed somehow; that is why secrecy confers a certain value on that what is kept secret. (And that is why people will often go to great lengths to detect, unravel, or find out what is kept secret!) And so the child's hiding of a secret is also a sign of growth. Growth toward autonomy, toward independence. And now a certain openness, mutuality, transparency is transgressed in the child's keeping a secret from the parent. By having a secret or by hiding something, the child separates self (the soul) from the family (community). Thus, the experience of learning to keep a secret is a virtual necessary part of childhood and of growing up.

The experience of secrecy is always at the same time an experience of self, of personal identity. Secrecy gives us a sense of depth of self. And the variety of the experience of secrecy points at different layers and domains of meaning and of the understanding of identity. In order to come to terms with those different layers and dimensions of meaning it may be helpful to ask: “How is the self concealed or revealed in the practice of secrecy?” “What are the consequences for the formation and shape of identity?”

There is no doubt that secrecy is a common human experience and that secrecy is a distinct feature of the experience of childhood, therefore it is somewhat surprising that the nature and significance of secrecy is still so little studied, secrecy is really a secret to us. On the one hand, there is the question of the meaning of secrecy that children experience and the significance of secrecy in the child’s growth and educational development. On the other hand, the child himself or herself, is a secret to us as well. Who really is this child? What makes a child a child? What lives with a child? Can we hope to understand the child’s experience of secrecy if we cannot appreciate the secret that the child himself or herself is? These questions may sometimes be hard to untangle. But they force us to reflect on the interpretive sensitivities and sensibilities that are asked of us as we try to understand not only the meaning of secrets of childhood but also the meaning of childhood as secret. Minimally it would seem to require that we turn responsively as adults to children while leaving our secret adult agendas and self-preoccupied concerns behind.

Not only do children keep and share secrets, adults also keep secrets from children. In everyday life, parents and other educators constantly have to be able to distinguish actively between what is good and what is not good for children of particular age and circumstance. By controlling what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for a child to experience or learn at the various stages of their development, adults must keep certain things away or hidden from children. Thus, knowledge of and access to the cultural secrets of adult life—such as mature erotic knowledge and sexual practices, participation in adult entertainment (for example, drinking, gambling), involvements in adult institutions and workplaces (such as the military, government, education), and use of various forms of communication and transportation—become main criteria by which childhood is defined.

More specifically, from an educational point of view, childhood has become associated with the child's relative ability to read and consult print sources. By processes of selecting, organizing, and structuring of home and school curriculum, parents and professional educators selectively keep adult-secrets from young people. Curriculum development can thus be seen as a process of educational literacy, the gradual initiation into those secrets of adult cognitive, emotional, and moral life that are developmentally, logically, and morally judged suitable for the growing person.

However, the control of adults over domains of cultural secrecy is changing in modern society. The erosion of cultural censors on the content of television and radio programs, and the explosive dissemination of other nondiscursive media, such as video movies and music videos, have largely destroyed the effectiveness of the textual media in shielding or protecting the child from unsuitable sources and premature vicarious experiences. One needs no special literacy skills in having access to pictographic and audiographic media. In fact, it is hard to hide ones children and even to shield oneself from indiscriminate bombardment of cultural material. The modern media show it all: gratuitous violence, human horrors, mature sexuality, social catastrophies, environmental disasters, images of impending doom, documentary terrors. Television has become the medium of total exposure, unable to keep secrets of any kind from those who are vulnerable, undeveloped, and dependent. Without secrets there can be no such thing as childhood, says Postman in his text The Disappearance of Childhood. To the extent that the nature of childhood is defined in terms of the maturity inherent in competencies of print literacy, Postman concludes that childhood is bound to disappear as the cognitive development of reading looses its importance to influences from non-print media. But tying the notion of childhood to print literacy may reflect a narrow view. While adults may have lost certain control over the child's access to adult culture that does not mean that, on the one hand, children themselves no longer experience childhood secrecy, or that, on the other hand, children and the phenomenon of childhood no longer constitute interpretive challenges to adult understanding.

Children and the secrecies they experience raises questions for adults who feel pedagogically responsible for their welfare and growth. This does not imply, of course, that particular secrets of particular children should be intruded upon. But it does mean that adults may become more thoughtfully aware of the significance of child secrecy in their active relations to children and in the total picture of human becoming. In the text Childhood's Secrets (1997), that resulted from this research, the pedagogy of secrecy is explored in its various aspects.