Why Children Misbehave

Originally by Pat Steffens, Extension Family Life Specialist
Revised by Kathy Bosch, Extension Specialist, Family Life Education

Understanding why children misbehave is important. We can respond more effectively to them and their behavior when we figure out what is causing the problem.

Children misbehave when they don't feel well. Children need plenty of sleep, nutritious food, exercise and fresh air. When children don't get these things, they have difficulty managing their feelings and coping with daily life. A tired child can be cranky. A hungry child can be irritable. A sleepy child can be fussy. A sick child can be cross.

Children misbehave when they feel rejected. Children who feel unloved and unwanted may become resentful, moody and ill-behaved. When parents or other adults ignore children's thoughts and feelings, youngsters tend to think of themselves as unworthy. Children need and want to be accepted.

Children misbehave when they lack knowledge and experience. Children aren't little adults. They're not born with information and wisdom. Mistakes and some misbehaviors are part of the learning process.

Many acts that parents call "bad" are simply mistakes. These mistakes need to be talked over and explained. Children need firm but fair guidelines geared for their age and developmental level.

Children misbehave when they are upset and feel insecure. Children need attention and the security it provides. Change causes upsets. When mother is sick, when a new baby arrives or when the family moves to a new neighborhood, misbehavior is much more likely. Reassure children that they are loved and their home is a safe place.

Children misbehave when they're discouraged. Children feel discouraged if they don't hear praise for the good and positive things they accomplish. They may misbehave to get needed attention and closeness from their parents. Give children sincere praise, compliments and encouragement.

Children misbehave when they feel unloved. Children want to please those who love them. Without a loving relationship, children have no reason to behave in acceptable ways - except to avoid punishment. It isn't enough that parents love their children. Love needs to be shown and demonstrated. Tell your children, "I love you!"

Children misbehave when they lack confidence. Feelings of inadequacy may cause children to brag, boast or fight, or they may be unwilling to try new things and withdraw. "Put downs" make children feel worthless or scared of failure; encouraging words help children feel confident and build self-respect.

Ways to Prevent Misbehavior

Feeling Unloved

Are parents too pushy ?

06 November 2008

Are some parents leaving their children feeling unloved ? This was the basis of an article published recently in The Daily Telegraph. The article goes on to say that middle class parents especially those with higher incomes are more inclined than others to put pressure on their children.

Is this right ? Should children be pushed in order for them to reach their full potential ? The Government-backed survey found that four in ten children feel ' very pushed ' to succeed at school. Also more than half of the most pressurized children felt that their parents cared more about their academic performance than their happiness. Parents who send their children in independent schools are more likely to beleive children should be put under pressure.

The article also stated that parents with higher incomes are less likely to spend regular 'family time' at home according to a poll of 4,000 parents and children in England and Wales.

I have to say this makes me feel a little bit sad, also a bit angry, knowing that there are some parents who will never be satisfied, or content with what their children acheive. Is it a case of ' I missed some opportunities and I will make sure that my children will not' or that they are planning their childrens lives out for them, instead of letting them make their own decisions, or is it a case of 'we are paying for your education and you will jolly well be successful' !

I am not talking about 6 year olds opting out of school or indeed insisting that homework should be done and children working to the best of their ability and supporting that, but also seeing them as individuals, who when they grow up will have their own lives, and will make their own choices.

Fair enough give them the opportunity to try something new, but if it does not work out, or the child is not enjoying it then stop, maybe try something else, after all they may not have the same interests as you.

Maybe children should be pushed, but pushing them relentlessly I feel is a mistake, if a child has worked hard and has done their very best, that is all that you can ask. If that means they fall short sometimes, then that is how it is and something that we we have to accept, which of course is what some parents find very hard to do, and see the failure is a reflection on them.

Family time is precious, especially in our very busy lives, I feel sometimes that it has to be 'scheduled in' and it should not be so. Is it because parents are out working ever longer hours in order to provide the schooling, the hobbies or whatever else?

When in reality children need time and contact with their parents. No amount of endless music lessons, clubs or whatever else it is can substitute for the love and support shown by parents.

source site: click here

Bringing New Life to Your Marriage
by Carol Heffernan

It often starts with something small. Maybe she arrives home from shopping to find that the kids aren't in bed yet. She thought her husband would have realized that the family needed to get up early, so the kids needed to go to bed early.

He didn't think it was a big deal. Besides, he was playing with them and they could take a nap the following day.

She is upset and communicates this to him, but before too long, she can tell that he is upset with her for being upset with him!

When she speaks up, he rolls his eyes. He thinks she’s about to nag and she thinks he’s very insensitive. And so it goes . . .

For the Unloved Child Care Worker

Does the child expect a child care worker in his life? Does it surprise you that you're unwanted?

Because the child care worker isn't seen as being a part of the natural order of a child's life, the worker isn't entitled to any of the pre-conceived responses from the child which a parent or a peer might expect.

The child care worker must, therefore, understand the roles which the child already perceives and using this information and his skills, develop his role according to reasonable and professional expectations.

"Fantasy Family"

The "Fantasy family" is a phenomenon which occurs between the child & his mother in the first few minutes of their physical meeting & continues in spurts in the mind of the child, perhaps in anticipation of coming visits or in an attempt to escape from reality, by dreaming of living within the "fantasy family."

The "fantasy family" is different for each individual. Basically, it consists of a caring & loving mother who has need for the child & protects the child. She is the child's "wonder mommy." The child sees himself as obedient & good. He doesn't get into trouble, is successful & makes his mother proud.

The mother sees the child as her baby who needs her nurture, love, experience & attention. She also sees the child as someone who should give her a thankful response for the efforts & sacrifices that she has made & will make. Although the idea will be different for different individuals, the situation will follow a general pattern.

It makes little difference that the child has been physically abused by the natural family or that he is mentally scarred by emotional disturbance, retardation, malnutrition, or lack of affection. It makes little difference that the mother is out of the picture for weeks, months, or even years at a time.

It makes little difference that the child verbalizes his hatred for his mother or his mother's hatred for him. The "fantasy family" still exists for the child & the personalities identified in that "fantasy family" are his natural parents as he perceives them. Although the "fantasy family" appears to fade as the child grows older, it still continues; it's just under a pile of reality.

This affects both the child in care & the child care worker directly, since the child care worker is rarely perceived as a personality of this "fantasy family" & fights the battle of being a parent in the child's mind. Thus, the child care worker does 'not deserve' the devotion or responses the "fantasy family" is entitled to.

When the child care worker must act as a disciplinarian, or has sacrificed to the nth degree, the child may remark how great & wonderful his parents are. It's important that the child care worker keep in context the fact that these great & wonderful people are the "fantasy family" who are nothing but good in the mind of the child.

When the child & the mother do meet, the child care worker can readily see the syrupy exchanges, that usually lasts only a short time. The mother assumes her natural role of protector, a strong individual who supplies the child's nurturing needs; the child, in turn, takes on the image of the ideal child.

The breakdown of this stage of the relationship is very rapid & the overprotective mother reverts to meeting her own needs. The child is no longer capable of playing the fantasy role. Mom hasn't lived up to expectations & the child hasn't lived up to expectations.

Depending upon the level of disturbance & the weakness of the relationship, the child comes away from the visit drained, bored, upset & almost always angry because he realizes that his mother will not be taking him with her. Reality has crept in, but has not destroyed the "fantasy family"; merely disorganized & repressed thoughts of it for a time.

The Unloved American

by Simon Schama

Two centuries of alienating Europe.

Issue of 2003-03-10
Posted 2003-03-03

On the Fourth of July in 1889, Rudyard Kipling found himself near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone with a party of tourists from New England. He winced as a “clergyman rose up & told them they were the greatest, freest, sublimest, most chivalrous & richest people on the face of the earth & they all said Amen.”

Kipling, who had travelled from India to California & then across the North American continent, was bewildered by the patriotic hyperbole that seemed to come so naturally to the citizens of the United States. There were many things about America that he loved, battling with a 12-pound Chinook salmon in Oregon; American girls (“They are clever; they can talk. . . . They are original & look you between the brows with unabashed eyes”) & he did go & live in Vermont for a while. But he was irritated by the relentless assurances that Americans seemed to require about their country’s incomparable virtue.

When a “perfectly unknown man attacked me & asked me what I thought of American Patriotism,” Kipling wrote in “American Notes,” his account of the journey,“I said there was nothing like it in the Old Country,” adding, “always tell an American this. It soothes him.”

The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who spent 2 miserable periods in the American Midwest in the 1880's - working as, among other things, farmhand, store clerk, railroad laborer, itinerant lecturer & (more congenially) church secretary, treated the street parades of veterans “w/tiny flags in their hats & brass medals on their chests marching in step to the hundreds of penny whistles they're blowing” as if the events were curiously remote tribal rituals.

The fact that streetcars were forbidden to interrupt the parades & that no one could absent himself without incurring civic disgrace both interested & unsettled Hamsun. Something ominous seemed to be hatching in America: a strapping child-monster whose runaway physical growth would never be matched by moral or cultural maturity.

Hamsun gave lectures about his stays in the United States at the University of Copenhagen & then made them into a book, “The Cultural Life of Modern America,” that was largely devoted to asserting its nonexistence. Emerson? A dealer in glib generalizations. Whitman? A hot gush of misdirected fervor.

For Hamsun, America was, above all, bluster wrapped up in dollar bills. “It's incredible how naively cocksure Americans are in their belief that they can whip any enemy whatsoever,” he wrote. “There is no end to their patriotism; it's a patriotism that never flinches & it's just as loudmouthed as it is vehement.”

By the end of the 19th century, the stereotype of the ugly American, voracious, preachy, mercenary & bombastically chauvinist, was firmly in place in Europe. Even the claim that the United States was built on a foundation stone of liberty was seen as a fraud.

America had grown rich on slavery. In 1776, the English radical Thomas Day had written, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it's an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand & with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

After the Civil War, European critics pointed to the unprotected laborers in mines & factories as industrial helots. Just as obnoxious as the fraud of liberty was the fraud of Christian piety, a finger-jabbing rectitude incapable of asserting a policy w/out invoking the Deity as a co-sponsor.

This hallelujah Republic was a bedlam of hymns & hosannas, but the only true church was the church of the Dollar Almighty. And how could the cult of individualism be taken seriously when it had produced a society that set such great store by conformity?

The face of the unloved American didn't, of course, come into focus all at once. Different generations of European critics added features to the sketch depending on their own aversions & fears. In the early 19th century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war & revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naïve faith that it had reinvented politics.

Later in the century, American economic power was the enemy, Yankee industrialism the behemoth against which the champions of social justice needed to take up arms. A third generation, itself imperialist, grumbled about the unfairness of a nation’s rising to both continental & maritime ascendancy.

And in the 20th century, though the United States came to the rescue of Britain & France in 2 world wars, many Europeans were suspicious of its motives. A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint & what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant, is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety.

Too often, the moral rhetoric of American diplomacy has seemed to Europe a cover for self-interest. The French saw the Jay Treaty, of 1794, which regularized relations with Britain (with which republican France was then at war), as a cynical violation of the Treaty of Alliance with France, of 1778, without which, they reasonably believed, there would have been no United States.

In 1811, it was the British who felt betrayed by the Americans, when Madison gave in to Napoleon’s demands for a trade embargo while the “mother country” was fighting for survival. But the gap between principles & practices in American foreign policy was as nothing compared w/the discrepancy between the ideal & the reality of a working democracy.

Although 19th century writers paid lip service to the benevolent intelligence of the Founding Fathers, contemporary American politics suggested that there had been a shocking fall from grace. At one end was a cult of republican simplicity, so dogmatic that John Quincy Adams’s installation of a billiard table in the White House was taken as evidence of his patrician leanings; at the other was a parade of the lowest vices, featuring, according to Charles Dickens, “despicable trickery at elections, under-handed tampering w/public officers . . . shameless truckling to mercenary knaves.”

A few transatlantic pilgrims, of course, saw American democracy haloed with republican grandeur. When, in 1818, the 23 year-old Scot Fanny Wright, along with her younger sister Camilla, visited the Capitol, the congressional morning prayer, “may the rod of tyranny be broken in every nation of the earth!” caused her to tremble with admiration.

Only later did she concede that she might have mistaken the commercial bustle of the country for democratic zeal. And, indeed, for most European travellers extravagant idealism was followed by an equally unbalanced disenchantment.

Nikolaus Lenau, a German poet who told a friend he meant to stay in the United States for 5 years, managed only a brief period, from 1832 to 1833. He couldn't tolerate a country where, he claimed, there were no songbirds. (In the 18th century, the Dutch naturalist Cornelius de Pauw, lecturing on America to the court of Frederick the Great, had solemnly insisted that dogs in the New World never barked.)

Other characteristics of American life alienated the Romantics: the distaste for tragedy (a moral corrective to illusions of invincibility); the strong preference for practicality; the severance from history; & above all, what the Germans called bodenlosigkeit, a willed rootlessness, embodied in the flimsy frame construction of American houses.

Europeans watched, pop-eyed, while whole houses were moved down the street. This confirmed their view that Americans had no real loyalty to the local & explained why they preferred utilitarian “yards” to flower gardens. No delphiniums, no civility.

The British who arrived in the United States in the 1830's & 1840's had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly & politically gauche, but with some hint of promise. What they found was a country experiencing an unprecedented growth spurt, both territorial & demographic & characterized by an unnerving rudeness, in both senses of the word. ladies & gentlemen dodged quids of tobacco juice & averted their gaze from the brimming cuspidors that greeted visitors to steamboat saloons & hotel & theatre lobbies.

The hallmark of Jacksonian America seemed to be a beastly indifference to manners, the symptom of a society where considerateness to others was a poor second to the immediate satisfaction of personal wants.

The conduct of Americans at dinner said it all. They wolfed down their food, cramming corn bread into their sloppy maws during meals that were devoured in silence, punctuated only by slurps, grunts, scraping knives & hacking coughs. (All those cigars.) At the Plate House, in the business district of New York, the naval captain & travel writer Basil Hall was astonished by the speed at which the corned beef arrived & then by the even greater speed at which it was demolished: “We were not in the house above 20 minutes, but we sat out two sets of company at least.”

Only the boy waiters yelling orders at the kitchen broke the quiet. The lack of polite conversation suggested the melancholy & dispiriting monotony of American life, on which almost all the early reporters commented.

Tocqueville explained the apparent paradox of anxiety amid prosperity as the result of the relentless obligation to be forever Up & Doing.

The European commentators’ dismay at the tyranny of American materialism was disingenuous, since many of them had come to the United States to repair their tattered fortunes or make new ones. Frances Trollope decided to sojourn in America when a rich uncle did the Trollopes the disservice of marrying late in life & still worse, begetting an heir.

Fanny Wright, whose ardor for America had been relit by the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphal tour in 1824 & 1825, visited Mrs. Trollope at her expensive rented house at Harrow Weald, outside London, in 1827 & persuaded her to join her.

Wright had bought two thousand acres of land on the Wolf River at Nashoba, Tennessee, w/the aim of establishing a communal settlement where slaves would receive the education & practical skills that would fit them for freedom.

Mrs. Trollope planned to visit the Nashoba utopia, w/3 of her 5 children & then proceed from Memphis, 15 miles away, up the Mississippi & Ohio Rivers to the thriving new city of Cincinnati, where she intended to make a smart little bundle.

But Fanny Wright’s settlement turned out to be a cluster of woebegone huts. Plank floors were set only a few feet above sodden mud. The chimney in the hut Mrs. Trollope shared with Wright caught fire several times a day. Instead of a model farm, there were a few slaves who were barely subsisting.

Of the all-important school there was no sight & no prospect. Mrs. Trollope, aghast at the filth & the fever-bearing mosquitoes, fled with her children to Cincinnati, which was, alas, an “uninteresting mass of buildings,” where hogs rooted in the streets.

Together with the French painter Auguste Hervieu (who had intended to teach at Nashoba), she flung herself into show business, remodelling a “Western Museum,” which had hitherto been a collection of natural curiosities & patriotic waxworks. Her son Henry became the Invisible Girl, booming prophecies in creepy darkness & with the help of glass transparencies, she created a vision of the Infernal Regions, featuring frozen lakes with erupting fountains of flame & electric shocks should the customers, peering thru grates, try & touch the exhibits.

Mrs. Trollope’s next venture, a galleried, gaslit emporium of consumer wonders, stocked with fancy goods supplied from Harrow by her husband, ended in debt practically before it began. Mrs. Trollope wasn't quite prepared to admit defeat, but one of her children was seriously ill & she decided that they had to return to England.

She stopped in Washington, then spent 5 months with a hospitable friend in Stonington, Maryland. There, filling notebooks with a tart, vivid account of her experiences, Frances Trollope took a genteel revenge on the land that had betrayed her.

“As I declare the country to be fair to the eye & most richly teeming w/the gifts of plenty, I'm led to ask myself why it is that I don't like it,” she wrote. She is struck by the fact that servants call themselves “help” & bewildered that so many thousands of young women would rather toil “half-naked” in factories than seek to enter domestic service.

When a Cincinnati neighbor, “whose appearance more resembled a Covent Garden market-woman than any thing else,” made the mistake of taking her arm & walking her about, “questioning me w/out ceasing,” Mrs. Trollope noted that, while democracy was very fine in principle, “it will be found less palatable when it presents itself in the shape of a hard greasy paw & is claimed in accents that breathe less of freedom than onions & whiskey.”

“Domestic Manners of the Americans” made Frances Trollope, at the age of 52, a sudden literary reputation & 250 pounds from the first edition. Her book was popular in Britain because it documented the stereotypes of cultural inferiority & boorish materialism that the Old World was avid to have confirmed about the New.

Stendhal annotated a copy & concluded that there was indeed a “smell of the shop” about the country. Baudelaire remarked that it was the Belgium of the West. But the book sold equally well in Boston & Baltimore, albeit to scandalized & infuriated readers.

“Trollope” soon became a popular shout of abuse in American theatres & on display in New York was a waxwork of the author in the shape of a goblin.

The wounds inflicted on American self-love by Mrs. Trollope were superficial compared w/the deep punctures made by Charles Dickens. In 1842, when Dickens published “American Notes,” an account of a visit to the United States, he had a huge American readership.

His novels were instant best-sellers here & many of them, most notably “Nicholas Nickleby” & “Oliver Twist,” had been dramatized on the popular stage. Despite, or perhaps because of, the unhappiness “American Notes” engendered, 50,000 copies were sold in a week in the U.S.

Dickens’s America is all Yankee repression & southern stupor. He saw Boston, New York & Philadelphia thru the keyhole of the prison cell & the madhouse. The Tombs, in New York, served as a metaphor for the dark, unforgiving world in which it was situated.

And the geographical heart of the country, though not a jail or an asylum, or a reeking warren like the Five Points, was a river of death. Decades before Joseph Conrad steamed his way upstream into the heart of imperial darkness, Dickens, travelling from Cincinnati downstream to Cairo, Illinois (reversing mrs. Trollope’s route), experienced the Mississippi as a septic ooze, a turbid soup of animal & vegetable muck.

Cairo lay in the stinking belly of the beast: “The hateful Mississippi circling & eddying before it & turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place w/out one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.”

The sense of America as a sink of contamination extended to its society & its institutions. In the Capitol, where Fanny Wright had been flooded w/tremulous rapture, Dickens saw “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought,” a clamorous gang of fakes, fools & tricksters.

His habitual outrage extended to the unrepentant practice of slavery in the South, but he never took the North’s support for emancipation as evidence of moral uprightness. The North, he wrote in a letter to a friend, hates the Negro quite as heartily as the South, but uses slavery as a pretext for domination.

Many people in the governing circles of both Britain & France were sympathetic to the South, not only because of the threatened interruption of raw-cotton supplies but also because a Confederate victory would preëmpt the emergence of a gigantic & powerful nation.

In November, 1861, when an American warship stopped the British steamer Trent to remove two Confederate agents bound for London & Paris, the ailing Prince Albert had to intervene to restrain British calls for war. According to Philippe Roger, whose “L’Ennemi Américain” (2002) is a brilliant & exhaustive guide to the history of French Ameriphobia, the fate of the South became a sentimental fashion in Napoleon III’s Paris.

When the American republic failed to break up, the European angst about its economic transformation & territorial expansion became a neurosis. For some time, the British government, worried about the growing imperial rivalry of the new Germany & the French Republic, had complacently assumed that American expansionism could be manipulated to keep its rivals at bay.

If the American fleet would, for its own purposes, prevent European undesirables from straying into the Pacific at no cost to the British taxpayer, jolly good for the Stars & Stripes. The Spanish-American War of 1898, which the French treated as the unmasking of Yankee imperialism, was looked at in London w/relaxed tolerance.

Rudyard Kipling’s lines on “the White Man’s burden” were written not in praise of some triumph of the Union Jack beneath far-flung palm and pine but to celebrate the fall of Manila.

Much as he loved the energy of America, Kipling became progressively unhappy the farther east he went. Soot-black, fog-fouled Chicago, its scummy river speckled w/rust & grease, was, he thought, an apparition of the American future.

He stood on a narrow beam at the Chicago stockyards, looking down on the “railway of death” that carried squealing hogs to an appointment w/two lines of butchers. The fact that the stockyards were also a tourist attraction only heightened his stupefaction.

Unforgettably, he saw “a young woman of large mold, w/brilliantly scarlet lips & heavy eyebrows . . . dressed in flaming red & black & her feet . . . were cased in red leather shoes. She stood in a patch of sunlight, the red blood under her shoes, the vivid carcasses tacked round her, a bullock bleeding its life away not 6 feet away from her & the death factory roaring all round her.”

It's hard to know where fact ends & fiction begins in Kipling’s “American Notes,” but the book’s bravura passages established the idées fixes of Europeans about the muscular republic on the verge of its imperial awakening: awesomely carnivorous, racially mongrel & socially polarized, both ethically primitive & technologically advanced.

At the turn of the century, that stereotype, along w/America’s cultural poverty (exceptions were always made for Mark Twain), imprinted itself in the literature of reporters from the old world. In an age absorbed by the physiology of national types, homo americanus seemed to have evolved for the maximization of physical force.

While chewing gum was preferable to chewing tobacco, its ubiquitousness mystified French observers like Jules Huret, until he decided that it was a workout for the overevolved Yankee jaws & teeth, which needed all the power they could get to tear their way thru the slabs of steak consumed at dinner.

Likewise, the appeal of American football—the Harvard-Yale game became almost as much a fixture of foreign itineraries as the stockyards was explicable only as quasi-Spartan military training. What really startled Europeans was the blood-lust the sport seemed to provoke in spectators. At one Harvard-Yale game, Huret listened in appalled fascination as a 19 year-old yelled “Kill him!” & “Break his neck!” from the bleachers.

Modern anti-Americanism was born of the multiple insecurities of the first decade of the 20th century. Just as the European empires were reaching their apogee, they were beset by reminders of their own mortality. At Adowa in 1896, the Ethiopians inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians; in 1905, the Russian Empire was humiliated in war by the Japanese.

Britain may have ruled a quarter of the world’s population & geographical space, but it failed to impose its will decisively on the South African Boers. And Wilhelm II’s Germany, though it was beginning to brandish its own imperial sword, remained fretful about “encirclement.”

The unstoppability of America’s economy & its immigrant-fuelled demographic explosion worried the rulers of these empires, even as they staggered into the fratricidal slaughter that would insure exactly that future.

It was self-evident that France & Britain should have been grateful for the mobilization of American manpower in 1917, which tipped the balance against the Germans & Austrians.

Colonel Charles E. Stanton’s declaration “Lafayette, we are here,” & the subsequent sacrifice of American lives for a European cause, seemed to herald a restoration of transatlantic good feelings. But, as Philippe Roger (& others, like the historians David Strauss & Jean-Philippe Mathy) explains, if the war created a brief solidarity, the peace more decisively destroyed it.

When Woodrow Wilson failed to persuade Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles & America withdrew into isolationist self-interest, all the old insecurities & animosities returned. Wilson was perhaps the most detested of all American Presidents by the French, for whom his self-righteousness was compounded by his failure to deliver results.

American generosity (in the French view) toward German reparation schedules fed into the conspiracy theories that seethed & bubbled in the anti-American press in the 1920's & early 30's. In “The American Cancer,” Robert Aron & Arnaud Dandieu went so far as to argue that the First World War had been a plot of american high finance to enslave Europe in a web of permanent debt, a view that was echoed in J. L. Chastanet’s “Uncle Shylock” & in Charles Pomaret’s “America’s Conquest of Europe.”

The newspaper France-Soir calculated the weight of debt to the United States at seventy-two hundred francs for every French man & woman. Nor was there much in the way of sentimental gratitude for General Pershing’s doughboys. Why, it was asked, had the engagement of American troops on the western front been delayed until 1918?

The answer was that the United States had waited until it could mobilize a force large enough not just to win the war but to dominate the peace.

For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, the author of “The American Abomination,” the threat from United States was not just economic or military. America now posed a social & cultural danger to the civilization of Europe.

The greatest “American peril” (a phrase that became commonplace in the literature) was the standardization of social life (the ancestor of today’s complaints against globalization), the thinning of the richness of human habits to the point where they could be marketable not only inside America but, because of the global reach of American capitalism, to the entire world.

Hollywood movies, which, according to Georges Duhamel, were “an amusement for slaves,” & “a pastime for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work & anxiety,” were the Trojan horse for the Americanization of the world.

Jean Baudrillard’s belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality was anticipated by Duhamel’s polemics against the “shadow world” of the movies, with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark.

The charge that the United States was imposing its cultural habits on the prostrate body of war-torn Europe returned with even more force after 1945. Americans thought of the Marshall Plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise altruism; European leaders like de Gaulle bristled with suspicion at the patronizing weight of the program.

Complaints against Coca-Colonization, the mantra of the anti-globalizers, were already in full cry in the 1950's. But as Arthur Koestler, who bowed to no one in his loathing of “cellophane-wrapped bread, processed towns of cement & glass . . . the Organization Man & the Readers’ Digest,” put it in 1951, “Who coerced us into buying all this?

The United States don't rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War to force their revolting ‘Coke’ down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it.”

Yet somehow, in the present crisis, American democracy has let itself be represented as American despotism. Some in the European antiwar movement see the whole bundle of American values, consumer capitalism, a free market for information, an open electoral system, as having been imposed rather than chosen.

Harold Pinter told peace marchers in London 2 weeks ago that the United States was a “monster out of control.” And while representatives of the Iraqi exile community in Britain narrated stories of the atrocities their families had endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein, banners in Hyde Park equated the Stars & Stripes with the swastika.

These cavils are not necessarily false, just because they’ve been uttered by Ameriphobes. Fast-food nation was invented in the 1830's & Captain Hall’s puzzled observation that in America the word “improvement” seemed to mean “an augmentation in the number of houses & people & above all in the amount of cleared land” has not lost any of its validity w/the passing of a hundred & seventy-odd years.

Early on, Europeans identified appetite & impatience as the cardinal American sins. Among the many anxieties of European friends, as well as enemies, of the United States is that Americans aren't being told that what lies ahead may be much more testing than a fly-by war & a drive-through peace.

But of all the character flaws that Europeans have ascribed to Americans, nothing has contributed more to widening the Atlantic than national egocentricity (a bit rich, admittedly, coming from the French). Knut Hamsun put the emphatic celebration of separateness down to a lack of education about other places & cultures & commented, perhaps waspishly, “It's almost incredible how hard America works at being a world of its own in the world.”

Virtuous isolation, of course, wasn’t a problem so long as the United States saw the exercise of its power primarily in terms of the defensive policing of its own continental space. But now that policing has gone irreversibly global, the imperious insistence on the American way, or else, has only a limited usefulness in a long-term pacification strategy.

Like it or not, help will be needed, given America’s notoriously short attention span, intolerance of casualties & grievously wounded prosperity. Serving the United Nations with notice of redundancy should its policies not replicate those of the United States & the United Kingdom might turn out to be shortsighted, since in Europe, even in countries whose governments have aligned themselves with America, there's almost no support for a war without U.N. sanction.