childhood

n.

1. The time or state of being a child.
2. The early stage in the existence or development of something: the childhood of Western civilization.

The period between infancy (about 1-2 years) and pubescence. Most of the physical and mental development of a person takes place in childhood. It is the critical period for establishing good habits of both exercise and nutrition which can last a lifetime. By the age of seven, nearly all of the motor control mechanisms in the brain are present and the child is rapidly developing motor skills. During the major growth spurts (usually experienced by girls between the ages of 9 and 12 years, and by boys between 11 and 14 years) reasonable exercise encourages growth of muscles, tendons, and bones, but excessive exercise can permanently damage bones and joints. Most experts agree that, although exercise during childhood is important, the emphasis should be on fun. There are both physical and mental dangers if children are forced into activities for which they are not ready. Parents should work with expert coaches and the child, to ensure that exercises are appropriate and carry little risk of permanent injury.

n

Definition: period of being young
Antonyms: adulthood

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Childhood as a historical construct can be defined as a constantly evolving series of steps toward adulthood shaped by a vast array of forces and ideas, ranging from ethnicity to class, from region to religion, and from gender to politics. Historians have tended to focus on two fairly distinct, if imprecise, phases of "growing up": childhood and youth. The former suggests a time of innocence, freedom from responsibility, and vulnerability. The latter includes but is not necessarily restricted to adolescence and is normally characterized as a period of "coming of age," when young people begin taking on the responsibilities and privileges of adulthood. Childhood suggests a period of shared expectations and closeness between parents and children, while youth, at least in the twentieth century, connotes a period of conflict between the generations, as hormonal changes and the new generation's drive for independence spark intense emotions and competition.

Changing Patterns of Childhood

In general terms, the historical arc of childhood in the United States shows several long, gradual, and not necessarily linear shifts. The "typical" free child in the British colonies of seventeenth-century North America belonged to a relatively homogeneous society—with similar values, religious faith, expectations, and opportunities—characterized by rural settlement patterns, informal education, and little contact with institutions outside the family. By the twentieth century, the "typical" child might encounter a bewildering variety of institutions, rules, and choices in a society characterized by wider differences in wealth, increasingly complex contacts with governments at all levels, and greater concentration in cities and suburbs.

Another shift, which began in the middle classes by the mid-nineteenth century but ultimately reached all ethnic and economic groups, was the "extension" of childhood. Although early Americans had distinguished between adults and children in legal terms (certain crimes carried lighter penalties for those under certain ages), on the farms and in the workshops of the British colonies in North America the transition from child to adult could take place as soon as the little available formal schooling was completed and a skill was learned. This gradual extension of childhood—actually, a stretching of adolescence, a term popularized at the turn of the twentieth century by child-psychologist G. Stanley Hall—occurred in several ways. Schooling touched more children for longer periods of time, as states began mandating minimum lengths for school years and cities began to create high schools. (The first high school appeared in Boston in 1821, but even as late as 1940, less than 20 percent of all Americans and 5 percent of African Americans had completed high school. By the 1960s, however, over 90 percent of all youth were in high school.) Lawmakers recognized the lengthening childhood of girls by raising the age of consent, even as the average age at which young women married fell during the nineteenth century from twenty-seven to twenty-two. Reformers in the 1910s and 1920s attempted to strengthen weak nineteenth-century child labor laws, which had generally simply established ten-hour work days for young people; in the 1930s further reforms were incorporated into New Deal programs. The dramatic expansion of colleges and universities after World War II added another layer to coming-of-age experiences, and by the 1990s, nearly two-thirds of high-school graduates attended institutions of higher learning, although the percentages for minorities were much lower (11 percent for African Americans and less than 1 percent for Native Americans).

Changes in the health and welfare of children were among the most striking transformations in childhood, especially in the twentieth century. Scientists developed vaccinations for such childhood scourges as diphtheria, smallpox, polio, and measles. Combined with government funding and public school requirements that students be vaccinated, these discoveries dramatically extended the average life expectancy. Not all children shared equally in these developments, however, as infant mortality in poor black families and on Indian reservations remained shockingly above average, even in the early twenty-first century. Prescriptions for "good" child care shifted from an emphasis on discipline among New England Puritans to the more relaxed standards of the child-centered Victorian middle classes to the confident, commonsense approach of the twentieth century's favorite dispenser of child-rearing advice, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care first appeared in 1946.

Of course, there were children living in every era of American history who did not fit into the mainstream society of the United States. Native American and African American children, whether slave or free, enemies or wards of the state, were faced, by turns, it seems, with ostracism and hostility or with forced assimilation and overbearing "reformers." Children of immigrants from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century and from eastern and southern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century encountered similar responses; their lives tended to veer away from the typical lives led by middle-class, native-born, Protestant American children. Immigrant children were crowded into shabby classrooms where teachers demanded rote memorization and forbade them to speak their native languages. Segregation—de jure in the South, de facto in much of the rest of the country—characterized most school systems. Despite the transparent racism of the "separate but equal" philosophy, segregated schools were not equal. Spending for public schools serving black students was often a tenth of the amount spent on white schools, black teachers earned a fraction of their white colleagues' salaries, and black children, especially in the rural South, attended school for fewer days per year than white students. Asian American children were often placed into segregated schools in the West. Hispanic young people found that in some communities they were "white" and in others "colored," which understandably engendered confusion about their legal and social status. Native American children were sometimes forced to attend boarding schools—the most famous of which, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and Hampton Institute in Virginia, were located half a country away from the students' homes—where they were stripped of traditional ways, given English names, and often subjected to harsh living conditions.

The Common Experiences of American Childhoods

Despite great differences in child-rearing customs, material and ethnic cultures, economic standing, and family size, there were important similarities in the ways that children grew up. For instance, all children were educated to meet the expectations and needs of their communities. Farm boys in New England or Georgia or Ohio were raised to become farmers, girls to perform the chores required of farmwives. The sons and daughters of southern planters were raised to fill their niches in plantation society, even as the children of slaves were educated informally to meet their responsibilities but also to protect their meager sense of self under the crushing burdens of the "peculiar institution." Native American children were taught to be hunters and warriors, wives and mothers, by instructors who were sometimes family members and other times teachers assigned to train large groups of children.

Members of every cultural group raised children to understand their particular traditions, including religious faiths, assumptions about proper use of resources, the importance of family, and appreciation for the larger culture. Each group developed and passed along to the next generation beliefs to sustain them and rituals to remind them of their heritages. Protestants and Catholics from Europe and, later, Latin America, sustained traditions of religious training culminating in first communion, confirmation, and other rites of passage; Jewish adolescents became members of their religious communities through Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs; Native American children participated in equivalent training and ceremonies designed to pass on their own origin myths and spirituality.

Despite the vast differences in cultures among the various ethnic and racial groups in the United States, the relatively steady decline in family size and the idealization of the family and of children—which proceeded at different rates among different groups and in different regions—affected children in a number of ways. For instance, as family size among the white, urban, middle class dwindled, children became the center of the family's universe. They were given more room—literally and figuratively—and enjoyed greater privacy and opportunities to develop their own interests. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the commercial publishing and toy industries began to take over the play and leisure time of children; nurseries and children's rooms filled with mass-produced toys and with books and magazines published exclusively for children. Although children continued to draw on their imaginations, as the decades passed, the sheer volume of commercially produced toys grew, their prices dropped, and more and more American children could have them. By the 1980s and 1990s, electronic toys, videotaped movies, and computer games, along with the still-burgeoning glut of television programming for children, had deeply altered play patterns; for instance, children tended to stay inside far more than in the past.

Some children and youth took advantage of the environments and the opportunities found in the West and in the cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Children of migrants and of immigrants differed from their parents in that, while the older generation was leaving behind former lives, children were, in effect, starting from scratch. Although they had to work on the farms and ranches of rural America and on the streets and in the sweatshops of the cities, young people managed to shape their lives to the environments in which they lived, which was reflected in their work and play. City streets became play grounds where organized activities like stickball and more obscure, improvised street games were played, while intersections, theater districts, and saloons provided opportunities to earn money selling newspapers and other consumer items. Such jobs allowed children—mainly boys, but also a few girls—to contribute to the family economy and to establish a very real measure of independence from their parents. Similarly, life on farms and on ranches in the developing West, even as it forced children into heavy responsibilities and grinding labor, offered wide open spaces and a sense of freedom few of their parents could enjoy. Of course, in both of these scenarios, boys tended to enjoy more freedom than girls, who were often needed at home to care for younger siblings or married while still adolescents. The stereotype of the "little mother," a common image in the popular culture of the cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an equally accurate description of the childhood work performed by rural girls.

Children and Childhood As Social and Political Issues

Even as children in different eras tried to assert themselves and to create their own worlds, a growing number of private and public institutions attempted to extend, improve, and standardize childhood. Motivated by morality, politics, economics, and compassion, reformers and politicians constructed a jungle of laws regulating the lives of children, founded organizations and institutions to train and to protect them, and fashioned a model childhood against which all Americans measured their own efforts to raise and nurture young people.

The middle class that formed in the crucible of nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization set standards in many facets of American life, including the family. Bolstered by the "domestic ideal," a renewed evangelical religious faith, and a confidence in middle-class American values, the growing middle class established myriad reform movements affecting all aspects of society, including children. Orphanages increasingly replaced extended families; Children's Aid Societies pioneered the "placing out" of needy city children with foster parents living on farms or in small towns. Educational institutions and schoolbooks were designed to instill citizenship and patriotism, create responsible voters, and teach useful vocational skills during the first wave of educational reform early in the nineteenth century.

Children and youth were also the subjects of numerous reforms and social movements in the twentieth century. Settlement houses helped educate, assimilate, and nurture urban children with kindergartens, nurseries, art and other special classes, and rural outings. Juvenile Courts, which originated in Chicago in 1899 and quickly spread to other urban areas, separated young offenders from experienced criminals and offered counseling and education rather than incarceration. By the 1910s, child labor reformers began attacking more aggressively than their predecessors the practice of hiring youngsters to work in mines and factories and in the "street trades." The 1930s New Deal included provisions prohibiting the employment of individuals under fourteen years of age and regulating the employment of young people less than eighteen. The modest origins of the U.S. Children'S Bureau in 1912 paved the way for greater government advocacy for the health and welfare of children. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centered partly on children, as the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) Supreme Court decision inspired hundreds of individual lawsuits aimed at desegregating the public schools of the South, and, by the 1970s and 1980s, northern school districts. The 1935 Social Security Act included programs like Aid to Dependent Children, which were expanded during the Great Society of the mid-1960s in the form of Head Start, Medicaid, school lunch programs, and need-based college scholarships. Finally, late-twentieth-century campaigns to reform welfare obviously affected the children of mothers moved from welfare rolls into the minimum-wage job market, while pupils at public and private schools alike were touched by efforts to improve education through school vouchers and other educational reforms.

The "discovery of Childhood" and American Children

One of the most controversial elements of the study of children's history is the degree to which children were "miniature adults" in the colonial period, "discovered" only as family size dwindled and the expanding middle class embraced the concept of the child-centered family. Most historians of American children and youth believe children were always treated as a special class of people, emotionally, politically, and spiritually. Even in the large families of colonial New England or in late-nineteenth-century immigrant ghettos, the high mortality rate did not mean individual children were not cherished.

But Americans' attitudes toward their children have changed from time to time. Because of their necessary labor on the farms and in the shops of early America, children were often considered vital contributors to their families' economies. Public policy regarding poor or orphaned children balanced the cost of maintaining them with the benefits of their labor. For instance, most orphanages, in addition to providing a basic education, also required children to work in the institutions' shops and gardens. Lawsuits and settlements for injuries and deaths of children due to accidents often hinged on the value to parents of the child's future labor, similarly, up through the mid-to late-nineteenth century child-custody cases were normally settled in favor of fathers, at least partly because they were believed to be entitled to the product of their offspring's labor, both girls and boys. The child-nurturing attitudes of the twentieth century, however, recognized the value of children more for their emotional than their economic contributions. Lawsuits and custody settlements came to focus more on the loss of companionship and affection and on the psychological and emotional health of the children and parents than on the youngsters' economic value.

Childhood At the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Many of the issues that have characterized children's experiences since the colonial period continue to shape their lives nearly four hundred years later. Youth still work, but their jobs tend to be part time and their earnings tend to be their own. For girls, smaller families have eliminated the need for the "little mothers" who had helped maintain immigrant and working-class households generations earlier. The educational attainment and health of minority children, while improving, still lags behind that of white children, with one shocking twist: the most serious health threat facing male, African American teenagers is homicide. Yet, however much the demographics, economics, politics, and ethics of childhood have changed, the basic markers for becoming an adult—completing one's schooling, finding an occupation, marriage—remained the same.

Bibliography

Berrol, Selma. Immigrants at School: New York City, 1898–1914. New York: Arno Press, 1978. The original edition was published in 1967.

Bremner, Robert H., ed. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970–1974.

Calvert, Karin. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Fass, Paula, and Mary Ann Mason, eds. Childhood in America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Graff, Harvey. Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Hawes, Joseph M., and N. Ray Hiner. American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Mason, Mary Ann. From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work & At Play. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1985.

Szasz, Margaret. Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since 1928. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974.

West, Elliott. Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Youcha, Geraldine. Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1985; repr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

—James Marten

Childhood is not a Freudian concept. A large part of psychoanalytic theory concerns the early years of life and childhood but, in a certain sense, we can say along with Donald Winnicott that "Freud neglected childhood as a state in itself" (1961).

Only after a wrenching period of revision (1895-1901) could Sigmund Freud come to acknowledge the active role of the child in sexual seduction and to abandon his earlier view of children as innocent victims of the incestuous desires of adults; this reversal, moreover, led him to theorize childhood sexuality for the first time. "In the beginning," he would later write, "my statements about infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively on the findings of analysis in adults which led back into the past. I had no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm almost all my inferences by direct observations and the analysis of very young children" (1914d).

It was in connection with the treatment of adults that Freud became interested in observing small children. As he wrote apropos of the case of "Little Hans," "I have for years encouraged my pupils and friends to collect observations on the sexual life of children, which is normally either skillfully overlooked or deliberately denied" (1909b). Freud indeed never abandoned this line of enquiry, as witness his celebrated account of the "Fort/Da" game played with a cotton reel by one of his grandsons, the personal observation of which he used to support his theoretical conclusions. As related in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), the fact that an act provoking unpleasure would be repeated, coupled with clinical findings from his treatment of traumatic neuroses, was what led Freud to formulate the concept of the death instinct.

After the publication of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), the first generation of analysts began observing and reporting on the behavior of their own children in reference to infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and castration anxiety. Anna Freud shared in this activity (Geissmann and Geissmann, 1992). Soon these analysts were joined by specialists on child behavior who had themselves been analyzed. They began to observe specific populations of disturbed children, such as delinquents, then certain periods of childhood, notably that of the earliest mother-child relations, and finally certain types of problems encountered (feeding, thumb-sucking, attempts at separation, etc.). In so doing they were "systematically constructing a psychoanalytic psychology of the child, integrating two kinds of data: data based on direct observation and data based on reconstructions with adults" (Freud, 1968).

It is important to note, along with Anna Freud, that psychoanalysts at first showed considerable reluctance to undertake such direct observation of children. The pioneers were more concerned to underscore the differences between observable behavior and hidden drives than they were to point up the similarities. Their chief aim was still to show that manifest behavior concealed unconscious processes. Anna Freud was initially interested in the defense mechanisms, which became accessible to an observational approach; she then turned her attention to children's behavior, to what they produced, and, lastly to the child's ego. She sought to include a psychology of the ego within the analytic framework, an effort further developed later by her friend Heinz Hartmann, whom she never completely disavowed.

On a practical level she created institutions for young children, the first in Vienna in 1924-1925, the last and most complex, which was established after the war in London, being the Hampstead Clinic, an extension of Hampstead Nurseries. At the end of her life she trained child specialists at Hampstead Clinic who worked within the framework of a psychoanalytic psychology of childhood. This work involved treating the child—not only with analysis—to prevent further disturbances, conducting research, and training future specialists in children's education and pedagogy by applying previously acquired knowledge.

During this same period, Melanie Klein also became interested in childhood. She did not base her theories on direct observation, however. Starting from the psychoanalysis of young children, she constructed a detailed picture of the internal world of the young child. She pioneered the use of play in analysis. Like dream interpretation for Freud, the free play of the child was for Klein the royal road to the unconscious and to the fantasy life. In The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), she argued forcefully that play translated the child's fantasies, desires, and lived experience into a symbolic mode. Her technique consisted in analyzing play just as one would analyze dreams and free association in adults, that is, by interpreting fantasies, conflicts, and defenses. The inner world of the young child as she describes it is filled with monsters and demons, and the picture of infantile sexuality she presents is strongly tinged with sadism. In discussing the death drive, she describes an infant whose first act is not simply a gesture of pure love toward the object (breast) but also a sadistic act associated with the action of the drive. Here, as Freud had earlier, Klein challenged a universal human shibboleth: the innocent soul of the child. This was one of the reasons why her work was often poorly received.

The direct observation of young children has expanded considerably in recent years, helped in part advances in technology: it is now possible to study newborns and even fetuses. It is interesting to note that, in this way, the significance and the complexity of the mental life of the very young child have been confirmed, along therefore with the intuitions and efforts of psychoanalysts working during the early twentieth century.

It is clear that psychoanalysis has renewed our vision and understanding of the world of childhood. However, that world remains highly complex, especially its pathology, and it is important to avoid seeing it in terms of adult behavior. Also, while psychoanalysis has enabled us to better understand that world, we must remember, as Anna Freud remarked at the end of her life, that it does not have the power to eliminate childhood neuroses and turn the child and childhood into that place where we would so much love to find innocence, the mythical innocence of a paradise lost.

Bibliography

Freud, Anna. (1966). Collected writings. New York: International Universities Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

——. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. SE, 10: 1-149.

——. (1914d). On the history of the psycho-analytic movement. SE, 14: 1-66.

——. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,18:1-64.

Geissmann, Claudine and Geissmann, Pierre. (1992). A history of child psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Klein, Melanie. (1975). The psycho-analysis of children. In The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. II). London, Hogarth. (Original work published 1932)

Winnicott, Donald. (1965). The theory of infant-parent relationship. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. (pp. 17-55). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1962)

—CLAUDINE GEISSMAN

The way societies treat their children, how they regard them, and how they order their lives reveal a great deal about the values of those societies. In Britain, a curious ambivalence about children has been displayed. Since the end of the First World War, there has been a flood of books on child rearing, much discussion and theorizing about their upbringing and early education, and a plethora of educational toys. The general assumption has been that this is the golden age of childhood, an enormous lollipop that will last for ever. At the same time, though, there is much envy of children and aggression towards them: they are battered, beaten, and sexually exploited (see child abuse) and in modern warfare they are killed and injured with impartiality.

In the 20th century it looks as if childhood was celebrated more self-consciously than at other times. As Aries (1973) has pointed out, the concept of childhood as a phase of life existing in its own right is a relatively recent one. Children have always been appreciated as a means of continuing the family line, a way of achieving a kind of immortality, a source of labour, and an investment for the future. But since, in the past, means of contraception were inadequate, more children were born than could possibly be fed in times of food shortage or poverty. They were commonly killed off either by exposure in the open or by being subjected to lethal child-rearing practices. Disease, famine, and war carried off many more and kept the world's population in check. Christian fastidiousness about the preservation of life checked the practice of infanticide in Europe, but unwanted children were left at church doors or outside almshouses. The foundling homes were a response to this practice. If the child was strong enough to survive, he was incorporated into the adult world and put to work as soon as possible. The chief distinction between adult and child was that the child, being smaller and weaker, was worth less and so paid less than the adult in his prime. The appalling incidence of infant mortality set limits to the relationship between parent and child. What was the use of becoming fond of a child who was almost certain to die? The duty of the middle-class parent was to prepare the child for the afterlife, and the possibility of salvation, rather than for the world he was likely to inhabit for so short a time. A look at the readers and grammar of a Puritan family makes this point forcibly: 'Child, you will not live long so prepare to meet your God!' seems to be the predominant message. In an agricultural society where food was produced by labour-intensive methods, there was a place for the labour of those working-class children who survived. If they were set to work at the earliest possible age, this was not merely exploitation: their labour was an important contribution to the needs of the family. The Industrial Revolution too, is often stigmatized as a period of particular horror for children, and our attention is drawn to the small boy sitting for hours opening and shutting a trapdoor in a coal mine, or the half-naked girl dragging a cart full of coal behind her, or to the child mutilated by unprotected machinery. All this happened, and was dreadful, but it must also be remembered the child was contributing to the survival of his family. Working-class families had no alternative and at least the child could take pride in his achievements. The almost desperate resistance to compulsory education when it was first introduced in the 19th century is evidence that many families needed their children's wages and could not afford to lose them to the schoolteachers. Even today many working-class children are eager to leave school as early as possible, in order to earn a living and support themselves. And this is at a time when changes in industrial practice make the employment of the young uneconomic.

The modern child is more likely to survive into adulthood than his predecessors (although the survival rate of working-class children is still lower than that of middle- and upper-class children), and with survival as a probability new attitudes have arisen. Moreover, now parents can control the number of children they have, and can space out pregnancies. Together with children who are 'wanted' comes a belief in the goodness of childhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conviction that the child is born pure but is ruined by the impositions of civilization which fetter and corrupt, and William Blake's view of the child's innocence and beauty, have powerfully affected society's view of childhood, which has come to be treasured for itself. This new vision was celebrated widely in 19th-century painting and poetry: the innocent child was set alongside the 'noble savage' and onto both were projected society's yearning for a better state. (The strain of maintaining the purity of this image of childhood was perhaps partly responsible for the decline into the sentimentality about children characteristic of middle and late Victorian times.) Then Sigmund Freud's theories of the powerful (but not specific) sexual drives in the small child undermined this unrealistic view of young innocence. And so two views of childhood have continued to exist side by side in our own time: the child as a beautiful and creative individual in his own right, and as one whose libidinous and chaotic energies must be harnessed and educated.

The 'permissive' view of child rearing has become firmly established both in the USA and in Britain. Beneath the belief that it is wrong to give a firm structure to the life of the child lurks the hope that life will be better for the child than it has been for the parent, even if there is no clear view of what is 'better' in terms of human security and happiness. Sometimes permissiveness has led to a disastrous abandonment of common sense and has caused much unhappiness to both parents and children. Respect for the child has, however, made family life less formal and has made schools happier places to be in; an appreciation of the creative abilities of children and closer attention to their ways of learning have been positive benefits of this new respect.

On the other hand, opposed to this belief in 'freedom' for the child has run an undercurrent of envy, fear of the child's sexuality, and even a hatred, which is expressed in punishment and exploitation. Relegation of the child to the nursery or boarding school, baby batterings and scoldings, the feelings of guilt engendered by the prohibition of masturbation or the insistence of regular bowel movements, have all taken their toll. wrote of this 'hatred of children' and insisted that it was the root cause of most of the problems of child rearing — bedwetting, thieving, and the inability to learn. These represented the rebellion of the child against its restrictive upbringing. Life in our large cities brings further restrictions — many children have little mobility, are confined to the upper floors of tower blocks, and have inadequate facilities for play. Often their capacity to understand and to learn are underestimated: they are assumed to be ignorant of the facts of death, sex, or race. It is hard to accept that children, like all human beings, are in their own terms engaged in the task of making sense of the world.

Finding that it is seemingly impossible to bring up children satisfactorily, many in the West have turned to other civilizations for hope and guidance. One thing is certain: the ills of Western civilization have not been cured by changes in child-rearing methods. Truby King's four-hourly feeding schedule did not cause the First World War nor Dr Spock the urban guerrilla!

Dispassionate evaluation of an activity as complex as parenthood is not easy. Children are at once relatively weak and vulnerable and also potentially disruptive of adult peace of mind. There is now a long period during which children have time to become adults; adolescence has been interposed between childhood and adulthood. It used to be that a Jewish boy was told at his bar mitzvah ceremony at the age of 13 that he had become a man; this is still so, but now he must be content, as all youths must be, with the prospect of years at school and possibly, if lucky, professional training before admission to adult society. Girls are in the same predicament: they may secure recognition by early motherhood, otherwise they may have to accept even lower status than boys at school and at work.

The problems associated with adolescence have long been recognized. A society that celebrates childhood, however equivocally, finds it exceedingly difficult to tolerate adolescents. Baby-faced charm gives way to gauche assertiveness, and the object of biologically triggered, parental protectiveness becomes a challenge to authority. Adolescents in Western society have a generally poor image. Aided and abetted by entrepreneurs for commercial gain, they tend to set up what seems to be a separate culture designed to exclude adults. In part this attempt to establish a separate identity is in reaction to a society unable to find a constructive place for them. In dress, in music, and in their general lifestyle, adolescents assert themselves by banding together — though preserving the class distinctions that characterize their parents: the middle-class 'hippy' drop-out is very different from the working-class punk rocker. Their activities are envied and feared. Some adults fear that the young may usurp their rights and privileges; others regret their own lost, though less liberated, youth; many envy the lack of obligations and the freedom of movement and expression that the young seem to enjoy. Adolescents are often the target of the moral panics that sweep society from time to time.

It has to be accepted that there never has been a golden age of childhood when children were cared for without question and when filial duties were carried out without protest. In recent times attitudes to childhood have changed in complex ways. Parents may enjoy their children more positively than those in other centuries have been able to do, but they still have to cope with the envy and inner conflict that is an inevitable part of their relations with the young. A proper balance between the care and the control of children remains difficult to achieve.

(Published 1987)

— Charles Hannam/Norman Stephenson

Bibliography
• Aries, P. (1973). Centuries of Childhood.
• Bettelheim, B. (1969). Children of the Dream.
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1974). Two Worlds of Childhood.
• de Mause, L. (1974). The History of Childhood.
• Erikson, E. H. (1965). Childhood and Society.
• Miller, D. (1969). The Age Between.
• Newson, J., and Newson, E. (1965). Patterns of Infant Care.
• Spock, B. (1969). Baby and Childcare.

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A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

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Quotes:

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward." - Ambrose Bierce

"But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell." - Louise Bogan

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." - Deepak Chopra

"Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder." - Leonard Cohen

"What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love." - Meister Eckhart

"Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of." - William Golding

See more famous quotes about Childhood

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - barndom

Nederlands (Dutch)
kinderjaren

Français (French)
n. - enfance

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kindheit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - παιδική ηλικία

Italiano (Italian)
infanzia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - infância (f)

idioms:

• second childhood    segunda infância (f)

Русский (Russian)
детство

idioms:

• second childhood    второе детство, впавший в детство

Español (Spanish)
n. - infancia, niñez

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - barndom

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
孩童时期

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 孩童時期

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 어린시절, (사물 발달의) 초기 단계

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 幼時

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الطفوله‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ילדות, גיל הילדות‬

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lladro childhood dream	lladro childhood fantasy
lladro childhood dreams