History of childhood

The history of childhood has been a topic of interest in social history since the 1960s.

Contents

History

Preindustrial and medieval

Wilson (1984) rejects a widely held popular opinion that medieval and early modern child rearing was indifferent, negligent, and brutal. Emphasizing the context of preindustrial poverty and high infant mortality (with a third or more of the babies dying), actual child-rearing practices represented appropriate behavior by the peasants. He points to extensive parental care during sickness, and to grief at death, sacrifices by parents to maximize child welfare, and a wide cult of childhood in religious practice.[1]

Historians had assumed that traditional families in the preindustrial era involved the extended family, with grandparent, parents, children and perhaps some other relatives all living together and ruled by an elderly patriarch. There were examples of this in the Balkans--and in aristocratic families. However typical pattern in Western Europe was the much simpler nuclear family of husband, wife and their children (and perhaps a servant, who might well be a relative). Children were often temporarily sent off as servants to relatives in need of help.[2]

In medieval Europe there was a model of distinct stages of life, which demarcated when childhood began and ended. A new baby was a notable event. Nobles immediately started thinking of a marriage arrangement that would benefit the family. Birthdays were not major events as the children celebrated their saints' day after whom they were named. Church law and common law regarded children as equal to adults for some purposes and distinct for other purposes.[3]

Education in the sense of training was the exclusive function of families for the vast majority of children until the 19th century. In the Middle Ages the major cathedrals operated education programs for small numbers of teenage boys designed to produce priests. Universities started to appear to train physicians, lawyers, and government officials, and (mostly) priests. The first universities appeared around after 1100, pioneered by the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (1150) and Oxford (1167). Students entered as young as age 13 or 14 and staying for 6 to 12 years.[4]

Children's Crusade

Main article: Children's Crusade

A spontaneous youth movement in France and Germany in 1212 attracted large numbers of peasant teenagers and young people (few were under age 15). They were convinced they could succeed in reaching Jerusalem and rescuing it from the Modlems where older and more sinful crusaders had failed. They felt the miraculous power of their faith would triumph where the force of arms had not. Many parish priests and parents encouraged such religious fervor and urged them on. The pope and bishops opposed the attempt but failed to stop it entirely. A band of several thousand youth and young men led by a German named Nicholas set out for Italy. About a third survived the march over the Alps and got as far as Genoa; another group came to Marseilles. The luckier ones eventually managed to get safely home, but many others were sold as lifetime slaves on the auction blocks of Marseilles slave dealers. The sources are scattered and unclear and historians are still not sure exactly what happened.[5]

Renaissance and early modern period

During the Renaissance, artistic depictions of children increased dramatically in Europe. In England in the Elizabethan era, the transmission of social norms was a family matter as were taught the basic etiquette of proper manners and respecting others.[6] Some boys attended grammar school, usually taught by the local priest.[7]

In Western Europe by 1500 it was widely recognized that children possess rights on their own behalf. They included the rights of poor children to sustenance, membership in a community, education, and job training.[8]

Ancien Régime & Enlightenment

In France and much of Europe from 1650 to 1790 educational aspirations were on the rise and were becoming increasingly institutionalized in order to supply the church and state with the functionaries to serve as their future administrators. Girls were ineligible for leadership positions and were generally considered to have an inferior intellect to their brothers. France had many small local schools where working-class children - both boys and girls - learned to read, the better "to know, love, and serve God." The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites, however, were given quite distinct educations: boys were sent to upper school, perhaps a university, while their sisters - if they were lucky enough to leave the house - were sent for finishing at a convent. No real alternative presented itself for female education; only through education at home were knowledgeable women formed, usually to the sole end of dazzling their salons.[9]

The corporate model of the family held that all members--including children--were subordinate to and labored for the benefit of the entire family. The thinker who broke loose from the corporate model and created the modern notion of childhood with its own autonomy and goals is Jean Jacques Rousseau. Building on the ideas of John Locke and other 17th-century Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau in his famous novel Emile: or, On Education (1762) formulated childhood as a brief period of sanctuary before people encounter the perils and hardships of adulthood. "Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly," Rousseau pleaded. "Why fill with bitterness the fleeting early days of childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you?"[10]

19th century

Victorian Britain

The Victorian Era redefined childhood, and allowed families to send their children to factories and mines for cash (which went to the father). Reformers attacked Child labor from the 1830s onward, bolstered by the horrific descriptions of London street life by Charles Dickens[11] and others, child labor was gradually reduced and halted in England via the Factory Acts of 1802-1878. The Victorians concomitantly emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, and broadly speaking, this attitude has remained dominant in Western societies since then.[12]

Japan

Childhood as a distinct phase of life was apparent in the early modern period, when social and economic changes brought increased attention to children, the growth of schooling and child-centered rituals. During the Edo period (1600-1871), parents demonstrated a preference for male children, but this did not affect daughters as adversely as in other Asian societies. Since daughters could inherit (if there was no son), the absence of a son did not afflict parents with the prospect of the end of their family line.[13]

A modern concept of childhood emerged in Japan after 1850 as part of its engagement with the West. Meiji era leaders decided the nation-state had the primary role in mobilizing individuals - and children - in service of the state. The Western-style school was introduced as the agent to reach that goal. By the 1890s, schools were generating new sensibilities regarding childhood. [14] After 1890 Japan had numerous reformers, child experts, magazine editors, and well-educated mothers who bought into the new sensibility. They taught the upper middle class a model of childhood that included children having their own space where they read children's books, played with educational toys and, especially, devoted enormous time to school homework. These ideas rapidly disseminated through all social classes [15][16]

United States

Illick (2002) argues that as America industrialized in the 19th century rural and working-class children worked from an early age, as they had in the colonial period. However the emerging middle class recognized childhood as a distinct phase of life, emphasizing gender differences demanding more and more schooling.[17] The public schools became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s as most states followed the Massachusetts model promulgated by Horace Mann, which in turn was based on German innovations. Innovations included state normal schools (teachers' colleges) that made teaching a paid profession for women, and the introduction of age-grading.[18]

Childhood on the American frontier is contested territory. One group of scholars, following the lead of novelists Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder argue the rural environment was salubrious Historians Katherine Harris[19] and Elliott West[20] write that rural upbringing allowed children to break loose from urban hierarchies of age and gender, promoted family interdependence, and in the end produced children who were more self-reliant, mobile, adaptable, responsible, independent and more in touch with nature their urban or eastern counterparts. On the other hand historians Elizabeth Hampsten[21] and Lillian Schlissel[22] offer a grim portrait of loneliness, privation, abuse, and demanding physical labor from an early age. Riney-Kehrberg takes a middle position.[23]

Public schools

Modern methods of public schooling, with tax-supported schools, compulsory attendance, and educated teachers emerged from Prussia and other German states in the early 19th century.[24] The Prussian system was adopted by the United States (led by Horace Mann), France[25], and other modern nations by 1900. Outside the U.S., public schooling ended at about the age of 14 for the vast majority, with only rich elites going forward.

Playtime and free time

Chudacoff has studied the interplay between parental control of toys and games and children's drive for freedom to play. In the colonial era, toys were makeshift and children taught each other very simple games with little adult supervision. The market economy of the 19th century enabled the modern concept of childhood as a distinct, happy life stage. Factory-made dolls and doll houses delighted the girls. Organized sports filtered down from adults and colleges, as boys made good with a bat, a ball and an impromptu playing field. In the 20th century teenagers were increasingly organized into club sports supervised and coached by adults, with swimming taught at summer camps. The New Deal's WPA built thousands of local playgrounds and ball fields, promoting softball especially as a sport for everyone of all ages and sexes, as opposed to increasingly professionalized adult sports. By the 21st century, Chudacoff notes, the old tension between controls and freedom was being played out in cyberspace.[26]

Historiography

In his highly influential 1960 book Centuries of Childhood[27] Philippe Ariès, an important French historian, argued that "childhood" is a concept created by society. This theme was then taken up by Cunningham in his book the Invention of Childhood (2006) which looks at the historical aspects of childhood from the Middle Ages to what he refers to as the Post War Period of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Ariès studied paintings, gravestones, furniture, and school records. He found that before the 17th-century, children were represented as mini-adults. Since then historians have increasingly researched childhood in past times. He worked on France in the Ancien regime and has been criticized by his reliance on evidence from rich families, for his concentration on the parent-child relationship, for his failure to embed the story in the broader social history, and his present-mindedness.[28] Most historians now reject the Ariès thesis that there was no "concept of childhood" until the 17th century because they find it much earlier.[29]

Notes

  1. ^ Stephen Wilson, "The myth of motherhood a myth: the historical view of European child-rearing," Social History, May 1984, Vol. 9 Issue 2, pp 181-198
  2. ^ King, "Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go," Renaissance Quarterly (2007)
  3. ^ Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (2003)
  4. ^ Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities (1997).
  5. ^ Dana C. Munro, "The Children's Crusade," The American Historical Review, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Apr., 1914), pp. 516-524 in JSTOR; and Norman P. Zacour, "The Children's Crusade," in R. L. Wolff, and H. W. Hazard, eds., The later Crusades, 1189-1311 (1969) pp. 325-342, esp. 330-37 online edition
  6. ^ Pearson, Lee E. (1957). "Education of children". Elizabethans at home. Stanford University Press. pp. 140–41. ISBN 0804704945. 
  7. ^ Simon, Joan (1966). Education and Society in Tudor England. London: Cambridge University Press. p. 373. ISBN 9780521228541. 
  8. ^ Vivian C. Fox, "Poor Children's Rights in Early Modern England," Journal of Psychohistory, Jan 1996, Vol. 23 Issue 3, pp 286-306
  9. ^ Carolyn C. Lougee, "'Noblesse,' Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fenelon and Saint-Cyr", History of Education Quarterly 1974 14(1): 87–113
  10. ^ David Cohen, The development of play (2006) p 20
  11. ^ Amberyl Malkovich, Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child: Romanticizing and Socializing the Imperfect Child (2011)
  12. ^ Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Child Savers and Their Culture: A Thematic Evaluation (1998)
  13. ^ Saeko Kikuzawa, "Family Composition and Sex-Differential Mortality among Children in Early Modern Japan," Social Science History, Spring 1999, Vol. 23 Issue 1, pp 99-127
  14. ^ Brian Platt, "Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The Nation-State, the School, and 19th-Century Globalization," Journal of Social History, Summer 2005, Vol. 38 Issue 4, pp 965-985
  15. ^ Kathleen S. Uno, Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan (1999)
  16. ^ Mark Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan (2010)
  17. ^ Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (2002) ch 4-5
  18. ^ Donald H. Parkerson, and Jo Ann Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside (1998)
  19. ^ Katherine Harris, Long Vistas: Women and Families on Colorado Homesteads (1993)
  20. ^ Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (1989)
  21. ^ Elizabeth Hampsten, Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains (1991)
  22. ^ Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens and Elizabeth Hampsten, Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey (2002)
  23. ^ Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (2005)
  24. ^ Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany 1648-1914 (1977) pp 275-84
  25. ^ Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976) pp 303-38
  26. ^ Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (2008)
  27. ^ Philippe Ariès, L'Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (1960), translated into English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood,
  28. ^ Adrian Wilson, "The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Aries," History & Theory, May 1980, Vol. 19 Issue 2, pp 132-53
  29. ^ Lloyd deMause, ed. The History of Childhood (1974) pp 5-6. 80-84, 102

See also

Bibliography

Literature & ideas

Britain

Europe

United States

Primary sources

Latin America

Asia

Child labour

Main article: Child labour

Historiography