Growing Up: The History of Childhood in Global Context (Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures) 1932792287, 9781932792287

Table of contents :
1. Childhood in Agricultural Societies
2. Childhood Amid Modernization and Globalization
About the Author

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E D M O N D S O N

Growing Up

L E C T U R E

The History of Childhood in a Global Context

S E R I E S

Peter N. Stearns

Growing Up

In 1975 Dr. E. Bud Edmondson of Longview, Texas, began an endowment fund at Baylor University to honor his father, Mr. Charles S. B. Edmondson. Dr. Edmondson’s intent was to have the proceeds from the fund used to bring to the University outstanding historians who could synthesize, interpret, and communicate history in such a way as to make the past relevant to the present generation. Baylor University and the Waco community are grateful to Dr. Edmondson for his generosity in establishing the CHARLES EDMONDSON HISTORICAL LECTURES. 888 This volume is Edmondson lecture twenty-eight. 888 The views expressed in these lectures are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Baylor University or Baylor University Press.

Copyright © 2005 Baylor University Press All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of Baylor University Press. Library of Congress Control Number: 2004115743 International Standard Book Number: 1-932792-28-7

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Growing Up The History of Childhood in a Global Context

Peter N. Stearns

Baylor University Press Waco, Texas USA

Lecture 1

Childhood in Agricultural Societies The Emergence and Elaboration of a Powerful Model

Childhood in world history requires a general introduction, but there is risk of too much abstraction early on: so first, a few vignettes, all drawn at least in part from childhood in the agricultural period of the human experience, which is the specific topic of this first paper. One of Muhammad’s important emphases, as founder of Islam, was his prohibition against female infanticide. This leads to several major questions. Why are some agricultural societies more willing than others to use infanticide as an ex post facto form of birth control? Where does infanticide fit into a picture of adult attitudes toward children? Did Islam promote significant changes more generally in the approach toward children and childhood? When Europeans with families began to arrive in North America, one of their practices that appalled native Americans was the use of physical discipline against children. The seventeenth century happened to be one of the tougher periods in the history of Western discipline, but it is also true that Western attitudes have often promoted a relationship between adults and children that has seemed strange to other societies. (A recent manifestation is the distaste expressed by most urban African consumers at the

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idea of putting infants in strollers, as opposed to keeping them physically close to mothers.1) We react with shock, even outrage, at the role of child soldiers in some of the current civil strife in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia—areas of the world that are still heavily agricultural. There are indeed important new features in this phenomenon. One involves the guns themselves: children have never had such access to murderous weaponry as they have gained, in many parts of the world, during the later twentieth century. But another novelty is less expected: the fact that we are so appalled at the very idea of children serving in armies. Large numbers of the participants in the armies of the American revolution (Americans, but also Hessians brought in by the British), were fourteen- and fifteenyear olds, and there were even soldiers as young as eight. Many Roman boys rushed to the army because it was preferable to agricultural labor and parental direction. Service in the military was a common outlet for young people in premodern societies, and obviously it has remained so—what’s odd, historically, is that so many of us have decided that this traditional practice is a violation of what childhood should be. Clearly, as I hope all these examples suggest, we need more historical understanding of childhood, and on a fairly wide geographical and chronological scale. Attempting to outline a world history of childhood is, obviously, an ambitious undertaking. Difficulties and limitations are considerable, and we must turn to these in further detail in a moment. I venture a sketch for two reasons. First, from a world history standpoint, it is important to branch out into this kind of history. World history is a rich field with a host of important discoveries to its credit. Recent research within a world history framework has added to our knowledge of environmental and biological developments, of migration patterns, and of relationships among major societies with particular attention to the economic vitality of East Asia. Yet a world history context has been only fitfully applied to some of the more private or personal aspects of the human experience, with the result that the field can often 1 Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958).

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seem dominated by anonymous forces—trade relations still constitute the most systematic world history focus—without clear applicability to the ways most people actually experience their lives. Dealing with the history of childhood through attention to world history emphases, including comparative analysis, allows us to explore additional implications in the field, utilizing but not simply repeating existing world history markers that include of course basic chronology or periodization. The intent is both to illustrate and to contribute to the world history approach. The second spur to this sketch focuses on childhood. Research on the history of childhood, which receded during the 1980s for several reasons, is now reviving strongly, a welcome development. Childhood is one of the fundamental phenomena in human societies, and knowing more about its historical development will enhance our understanding of the past and of the forces that have led to present conditions and problems. Much research, quite properly, focuses on particular societies and time periods to discover the context for what is in many respects a highly varied and complex experience. Yet it is important, at the same time, to have a sense of the big picture—and world history is now sometimes termed, aptly enough, “big history.” The world history context forces attention to defining the major changes and continuities in a phenomenon like childhood—which should in turn help shape and define any more particular study. It also requires awareness of commonalities and differences among major societies, in a field that has too often been viewed through a strictly West European and North American lens. This comparative sense produces findings in its own right, as well as guidelines that again should properly inform more narrowly constructed projects lest they make erroneous claims about distinctiveness or peculiarity. The intent, for this second goal of the sketch, is to contribute directly to our understanding of childhood as a phenomenon and process through time.2 A brief word about difficulties. Childhood is a harder subject than most to write about historically, because children leave relatively few direct records. In this presentation I emphasize 2 Paula Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Childhood: In History and Society, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2003).

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childhood—the societal concept shaped heavily by adults—rather than children in part to acknowledge this difficulty, though I intend to deal with children too. We can discuss opinions concerning child discipline that are held by adults during different historical periods; but, to take one important example, we know much less about how children experienced such discipline. More broadly, we can learn much about historical childhood, through use of recollections, statistical evidence, material artifacts and folklore; but there are, inevitably, certain issues that cannot be definitively probed. A second problem, directly relevant to world history (though one which the world history approach can help address) involves the unevenness of historical work on childhood. There is a rich literature on childhood in the West, despite ample room for further research. We’re beginning to get really interesting studies of childhood’s history in other regions, such as Latin America; but balance has yet to be achieved, and this poses a further challenge to generalization. A third problem, even for the Western history of childhood, involves what turns out to have been a false start of three decades ago. The history of childhood was introduced by a masterful French scholar, Philippe Ariès. Ariès argued that premodern Western society lacked a concept of childhood, tending to view children as small adults with no special emotional or legal allowances. His approach was amplified, and sometimes partially misinterpreted, by scholars who noted some of the apparently appalling features of premodern childhood: the high death rates, for example; the frequently harsh discipline; the involvement of relatively young children in work, and sometimes very demanding or sternly regulated work; and other patterns, such as the tendency to reuse the name of a dead child for a newborn, which seemed to suggest a cavalier approach both to infant death and to children’s individuality. All this added up, in the view of some pioneer scholars such as Lloyd deMause, to a truly tortured past for children. The twentieth century, in this view, emerged as the first time in which childhood was conceived with any real decency. Or, as another historian argues, premodern families’ treatment of children suggested no more positive emotion than one would

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expect to find in the way a bird treats its young.3 This schema, suggesting progress only with modernity, interestingly coincided with other proclamations of triumphant contemporary gains, as in the hailing, in 1903, of the twentieth century as the “century of the child.”4 But the whole argument spurred an almost immediate revisionist response by scholars immersed in the glories of the Middle Ages or early modern period, who argued that children in the past were loved and treated kindly, that there is no real history of quality parenting (a concept they considered a human constant), and that the whole initial justification for historical study of childhood was fatally flawed. The debate, fairly predictably, had two related results. First, this much controversy about basic issues discouraged many scholars, and research on the history of childhood slowed. Second, if the revisionists were correct, there was no significant change in the personal aspects of childhood over time, which meant that historians could better devote their energies to other topics.5 This controversy is now past, and the scholarly taps have been turned on again. Historians are contributing important studies concerning the material culture of children, with a focus on toys 3 Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 4 Theresa Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907); David Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America 1890–1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998). 5 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (New York: Basic Books, 1970); for the revisionist view, Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: ParentChild Relations from 1500 to 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For another major early work on colonial America, a work that also heavily focused on the psychological and oscillated creatively between the two poles, noting some major continuities (though less benign than those emphasized by Pollock) but also significant change, see Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977). For a strong statement of change and modern progress, see Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood: The Evolution of Parent-Child Relationships as a Factor in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

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and artifacts: there’s an exciting new body of work on the emergence of children as consumers and as objects of adult consumption. Changing parental anxieties and shifting images of children, including the emergence of the “cute child” and the development of new prescriptions for children’s emotions, have generated another body of work.6 There’s considerable attention to poor children in industrial cities, including street activities and children’s cohesion around jobs such as newspaper hawking. Orphans and the phenomenon of adoption have stimulated some really imaginative research.7 While much of the work continues to center on the West, other societies begin to figure in as well. Latin American studies reflect the challenging juxtaposition of some standard Western assumptions about childhood, held by officialdom and the respectable classes, with very high rates of illegitimate birth and the resultant family arrangements that provide often impressive caregiving for children—a specific, child-focused example of the larger civilizational distinctiveness of Latin America in world history.8 And, as the following comments will suggest, we’re also learning more about childhood in Islam, in Russia, and in East Asia. It remains true that a disproportionate amount of this new research concentrates on relatively modern developments. In one sense, this is welcome. We are learning a great deal about the emergence of recent patterns that shape and explain childhood today in ways that can actually further an intelligent discussion of issues in policy, in parenting, and in other venues such as schooling and entertainment, through the mode of what is coming to be called behavioral history—the kind of history deliberately focused on using past change, and the causes of past change, to improve 6 Gary S. Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1997) and The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7 Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); E. Wayne Carp, ed., Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 8 Tobias Hecht, ed., Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

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contemporary understanding.9 We can thus tap history to grasp new behaviors on the part of grandparents; to trace and explain the shift, in the adoption arena, to a desire to identify rather than conceal biological parents; to probe why fears of abduction run so high in the contemporary United States; to account for grade inflation; to trace how children’s often envious zeal for material goods turned from a moral problem to a positively desirable trait; and to provide context for the emergence of newly identified phenomena such as Attention Deficit Disorder or the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.10 Of course, not all of the growing band of historians of children are so bent on contemporary explanation, but the interest in probing some of the undeniably huge changes associated with the emergence and evolution of modern childhood motivates a great deal of work, and properly so. This modernist clustering leaves a problem for the treatment of children in world history, quite apart from the disproportionately Western or United States targeting of much of the recent research. The primary focus of world-historical work and the areas of greatest contribution involve agricultural societies and periods of change before the modern era. I don’t mean to downplay important considerations that apply to the age of industrialization and imperialism, but I think most world historians would agree that their picture of the long nineteenth century is not dramatically different from pre-world history versions—except to insist on the importance of looking at reactions to imperialism from the standpoints of the societies involved, and not just imperial policies and rivalries. World historians add more to our picture of the twentieth century with greater emphasis, for example, on decolonization; and growing attention to contextualizing and exploring globalization from a historical perspective adds to the contributions, as I will discuss in the second paper. Nevertheless, the time periods when world history really shines are the postclassical 600 C.E. to 1450 C.E., running from the fall of the great 9 Peter N. Stearns, ed., Behavioral History (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming). 10 Paula Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A Modern History of Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

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classical empires to the rise and fall of the crucial Mongol interlude; and then the early modern centuries: both periods of significant change but operating well before the kinds of modern developments that have commanded the bulk of attention from the historians of childhood. The early modern period, from 1450 or so to the later eighteenth century, does admittedly depart from the strictest contours of the agricultural economy, with growing global emphasis on commercialization; but it remains nevertheless preindustrial. So we have a real issue concerning connections between world history and childhood history, and it’s the exploration of this issue, inevitably a bit speculative given the current state of research, that provides the subject for this first presentation. World historians have done splendid things with the periods in question (not to ignore some contributions as well to earlier eras): they’ve traced the surprisingly rich array of contacts among societies in AfroEurasia during the postclassical period; they’ve used the previously unduly ignored accounts of Muslim and Chinese travelers, as well as those of the more familiar Europeans; they’ve shown the impressive vitality of the South and particularly East Asian economies during the early modern centuries, too often oversimplified in terms of the rise of the West; they’ve reevaluated the significance of the Mongol period and the ensuing Chinese trade voyages of the fifteenth century; and the list could be expanded.11 But never, to my knowledge, in all of this have any of the world historians ever mentioned childhood and children—any more than have historians of childhood referred to the larger world history picture in the premodern centuries. So how can we begin to explore some fruitful linkages? The most obvious step involves getting a fix on some of the key patterns of childhood in agricultural societies generally, and 11 Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ross Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (London: Croom Helm, 1986); J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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this in turn involves a two phase argument. Phase one features some discussion of the implications for childhood of the transition from a hunting and gathering economy to agriculture; and phase two features some generalizations about agricultural society itself, again where children were concerned. We’ve already noted that one of the terms sometimes applied to world history is “big history”—a focus on the really huge adjustments in the human experience—admitting that finer tuning, with more detailed attention to particular societies in particular centuries or even decades, may be highly useful but that the larger context should be established first.12 If we were really doing a full big history of childhood, for which I am far from adequately knowledgeable, we could linger on some of the landmarks of primate evolution. At what point, to take one crucial instance, did humans begin to differ from other primates in the relationship between weaning and dentition? While young great apes develop adult teeth very soon after weaning, with humans the process occurs years later (admitting that weaning is itself a social variable). This means in turn that whereas great apes are, in terms of food-gathering capabilities, effectively adults after weaning though doubtless with much still to learn, humans are dependent on adult care for a far longer period. Big history might also account for the differences in sexuality between humans and other primates, whereby instead of particular seasons of sexual receptivity, or heat, humans are more consistently arousable—a huge factor when it comes to the regulation of youth sexual behavior.13 Doubtless other evolutionary phases deserve attention when it comes to the full history of human childhood. But most world historians do not pretend to carry their story back so far, and there is no reason to hinge the world history–childhood history relationship on this extension. The marker that does stand out, however, and that fits world historians’ sense that the development of agriculture (and of herding nomadism) constitutes the first real watershed in the 12 David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13 Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969).

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human experience, is the transition away from hunting and gathering, that first began to occur about 10,000 years ago in the northern Middle East–Black Sea region and that spread gradually to other parts of Afro-eurasia as well as being independently invented, though a bit later, in at least two other places.14 Obviously the initial transitions, occurring before writing, did not leave detailed records, but some key changes are clear and have further implications. The most important change, which suggests a substantial reconsideration of childhood, involves birth rates. Hunting and gathering societies generally tried to keep the birth rate fairly low, mainly by emphasizing prolonged lactation—up to four years or more. Lactation, of course, does not absolutely prevent conception, but it inhibits it, and hunter-gatherers clearly knew this and acted accordingly. Poor nutrition, infanticide, and in some cases use of abortifacient plants also reduced effective birth rates. Many nomadic societies would follow the same pattern of extensive control. The obvious reason was a desire not to overburden scarce food resources with too many mouths to feed. Children could help a bit in food gathering, but their work was at best supplemental to the family economy; they could not cover their own maintenance, and there was no big push to expand the ranks of children as a source of labor. Studies of contemporary hunting and gathering societies show that children either don’t work much before age fourteen, or do work yet actually reduce productivity by getting in the way. A kindred issue, in groups that must travel frequently, is the impossibility of caring for more than one young child per family while in transit. Children, in sum, were economic liabilities in the first human economy. By the same token, the achievement of the capacity for economic adulthood was usually surrounded by considerable ritual, testing, and celebration—particularly for males in association with the ability to join the hunt. Prolonged lactation may also have created needs to demonstrate that young adult males could separate from their mothers; it is 14 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Spark Publishers, 2003); John Mears, Agricultural Origins in Perspective (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2003); Brian Fagan, Peoples of the Earth (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983).

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intriguing to speculate about the consequences of these parentchild connections.15 The agricultural economy was a different matter, for children became a vital part of the family labor force. Of course there were costs associated with young children, particularly before some work could begin at age five or so. Children would not fully earn their keep until early teens; but by midteens they could actively contribute to the family economy through their labor in the fields and around the home. Definitions of the functions of children changed accordingly, and the birth rate rose in part by lowering the length of lactation usually to 18–24 months. Maximum fertility was still undesirable. We know, from the example of the Hutterite religious group in Canada in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, that when a family really wants to breed to the fullest it will average twelve to fourteen children. Few agricultural families did that, for having more than seven children would place too severe a burden on production and property. So most families did continue to use lactation, restraints on youth sexuality, and a slower breeding pace when parents reached their 30s and 40s to keep family size within bounds. (Even here, it remained desirable to have at least one child late in the reproduction cycle, to help assure provision of care when parents themselves grew old; here was another indication of the labor functions of childhood. Premodern Germans would revealingly call this later-in-life birth a Wunschkind, or desired child.) So there was a significant qualitative and quantitative change in childhood associated with the spread of agriculture. It is also worth noting that with changes in life expectancy, agricultural societies generated more overlap between grandparents and children, which provided additional sources of care while changing the experience of childhood in other ways.16 Correspondingly, given the pervasive labor service of children after infancy in contrast to hunter-gatherer society, the celebration of the achievement of adulthood shifted; with children Tiger, Men in Groups. Louis Henry, “Some Data on Natural Fertility,” Eugenics Quarterly 8 (1961): 81–91; Henri Léridon, Human Fertility: The Basic Components, trans. Judith F. Helzner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 15 16

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already actively working, the transition was less clear than had been the case with hunters. Artisans in agricultural societies did formally note the end of apprenticeship, but for the farming majority the change was less marked. Attention shifted in many cases to the demonstration of religious adulthood, usually around age thirteen, with some kind of testing and confirmation ceremony. This was important and solemn, but it had little to do with economic matters and indeed did not demarcate an economic adulthood in most cases. Economic adulthood, instead, was usually noted by the capacity to marry and/or form a partially separate family, and this could vary considerably by social class, gender, and the customs of particular societies. Adulthood, in other words, was more variable in agricultural societies than had been true in hunting and gathering communities because of the common reliance on older children for family labor. These changes set up the second analytical approach to childhood in agricultural societies, after the discussion of the initial transition toward more child labor: the delineation of characteristic themes. The dominant issues involve the relationship between work and power where older children were concerned, and the delicate balance between numbers and restraint when younger children were considered, with gender a factor in both calculations. On young children: most agricultural families, unless they were infertile, had to juggle the need for a substantial birth rate, and doubtless the spurs of emotional and sexual desire, with the stark realization that too many children meant trouble for the family economy. Class entered in here. The rich in all agricultural societies could and did indulge a much larger number of children than did the vast majority of peasants and artisans. Here was a way to assure succession and often ancillary appointments and marriage alliances while graphically illustrating procreative prowess. Upper class status could be enhanced by lots of children, in other words, as well as demonstrated. Many societies furthered this abundance of children through polygamy or concubinage. Given resources and numbers of children, there could be considerable reliance, in the agricultural upper classes, on domestic child care arrangements and wetnursing, though this did not preclude

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strong emotional attachments to children. All of this was far different from the conditions of the majority, where controls over sexuality needed much greater attention in the interests of limiting family size.17 Gender counted for a great deal. Agricultural societies were patriarchal, and, given transmission of power and property to males at all relevant social levels, this diminished the importance of female children at least to some extent; it also could inflate birth numbers through the explicit effort to produce at least one male heir. Many agricultural societies used female infanticide or abandonment as a family limitation device, and this applied occasionally to upper class families as well as to the poorer majority. Roman and Greek aristocratic fathers, away on a trip, sometimes wrote instructions to their pregnant wives to abandon the child in some remote area should it prove to be a girl; in the classical period, indeed, Greek family heads could disavow any newborn, leading to abandonment rather than outright killing, presumably to minimize guilt.18 The practice was even more widespread and durable in China. For the masses, birth rates and the balancing act with child labor could produce a certain degree of resignation toward infant death, quite apart from deliberate acts of infanticide. It is important to be careful here. The first generation of historians of childhood, eager to identify modern and premodern differences and mistaking practices like strict physical discipline or the reuse of children’s names as signs of emotional coldness, failed to realize what sadness the death of a young child could bring.19 Many families marked calendars and religious materials with the deaths of their young, and grief could be durable and agonizing, probably particularly for mothers but for fathers as well. At the same time, without some death broods threatened to be too large for the 17 G. Robina Quale, Families in Context: A World History of Population (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992); Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 18 Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Life: From Conception to Old Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 19 Shorter, Making of the Modern Family; deMause, Childhood.

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family economy to sustain. Amid some variety most obviously depending on available land, families could want as many as four children to reach adulthood, from a strictly economic standpoint; but this meant, with a birth rate of six to eight, an assumption that a near-majority of children born would die. Too many young children drained resources directly, and too many older children could surpass the family’s capacity to provide for thorough placement and inheritance. Despite sadness, many families depended on a certain amount of child death, and they certainly had to expect such death as mortality rates for young children ranged from 30–50 percent. Whatever medical care was available for older children and adults was rarely used for younger children, a sign of some special fatalism. Premodern families were also notorious for lack of safety precautions for young children—for example, around heights, water, and wells—again a sign of fatalism. Agricultural families, in other words, particularly among the masses but amid the upper classes as well, balanced a different set of emotional attachments and expectations of, even needs for death than would be true in more modern societies. It is intriguing to speculate about the emotional calculus involved.20 It is also vital to remember an even more obvious point: children themselves, in agricultural societies, grew up surrounded by death. Most would see several siblings die and would need to form their own adjustments and expectations accordingly. Other measures helped provide economic balance. At the lowest economic levels, particularly in premodern cities, fairly young children could simply be put out of the home, not at the expense of recurring contact but because there were simply no means to provide. This still occurs in countries like Brazil. Where institutions were established to provide care for abandoned children— though in most cases this approaches more modern times—they were often used by poor families to tide them through bad periods, rather than for complete separation. Many families hoped to reclaim their children when conditions improved.21 20 Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 21 David Ransel, Mothering, Medicine and Infant Mortality in Russia

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Many ordinary families also hired out their children or passed them among kindred families as a means of evening out numbers with resources and labor needs. An older child might thus work for some years for a childless or elderly family. Or, in societies that encouraged more shared parenting, informal adoptions and work with relatives could balance resources and burdens. Outright adoptions in reaction to poverty or death of a parent were also common in societies like classical Rome. There is no single formula here: the constant is the need to juggle birth rates and available means amid relatively high though not boundless birth rates, and the need also to demonstrate some flexibility in attachments to individual children.22 For older children—what we would call adolescents, or youth—attention shifted to the tension between work needs and capacities, on the one hand, and maintenance of adult power on the other. The fact was that, by age fifteen or so, most children were capable of doing adult work, particularly in agriculture; but it remained important, for the maintenance of family property and social hierarchy, to preserve a clear degree of dependence. For female youths, this was often accomplished by early marriage— sometimes in early teens, even before puberty—combined with subordination to the (older) husband and the husband’s parents in an extended family hierarchy. These women effectively passed from childhood to a subordinate phase of adulthood with no clear youth at all (though custom sometimes prevented sexual activity in marriage for the first year or two). The need to limit births and also to identify paternity in patriarchal societies required careful familial regulation of young women’s behavior, or provision for early marriage, or both. (Washington, D.C.: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1990) and Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Elizabeth Kuznesof, “The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and Childhood in the 21st Century,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): forthcoming; Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York, 1984). 22 John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (London: UCL Press, 1996).

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The situation was more complicated for males. Few families had sufficient resources to allow adolescent males to set up families; they had to wait until at least their early 20s, and sometimes later. In this sense, male youth was normally prolonged, though catastrophes like war that reduced the overall population could modify this by opening resources for earlier marriage. Tensions between young men and ongoing dependence could be modified by service to other families, often under stricter discipline than the natal family was comfortable in providing. It’s been speculated that one reason for sending teenagers out to work for other families, beyond balancing resources, was to reduce conflicts between youth and parents. In many urban areas in Europe and Asia, young artisans had a wandering period between training and fuller adulthood—the Germans called this the Wandersjahre—in which they traveled from job to job, often drinking heavily with young colleagues and otherwise sowing some wild oats. Tolerance for student binges in higher classes served similar functions of release and control. Comparable devices were more limited for the rural majority, unless the young males bolted altogether for army or city or outright migration. Village festivals typically allowed male youth to let off steam. Rituals of inversion let them mimic landlords and village notables, parodying the apparatus of local power in ways that may have made them feel better when normal power relations resumed.23 Often bitter games pitted bachelors—the youth—against young married men, for example in tugs of war. Young men were also heavily involved in charivaris and other rituals that enforced village norms, often making sure that marriages were properly consummated. And many villages were reasonably tolerant of minor acts of vandalism, like pulling down chimneys, as part of a festival atmosphere. With all this, tensions could build nevertheless. In an extreme case in France in the eighteenth century, later middle aged fathers constituted the largest 23 Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Robert Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

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category of murder victims, usually at the hands of impatient dependent sons. Reconciling young men’s capacity and the need for their labor with family and social hierarchy was no easy task.24 All agricultural societies, finally, placed vivid emphasis on the importance of obedience and strong discipline—usually including physical discipline This served various purposes, of course, including religious goals. But it surely related to the need to plant early a habit that would help sustain children’s commitment to the family economy even in the teenage years. The effort did not always work, of course, but it surely helped accommodate the tension between work capacity and the needs of the family economy in a situation where child workers provided so much of the labor force. Thus far we have, obviously, focused on general features of agricultural societies around the world, features that distinguish agricultural societies from both hunting and gathering groups and from more modern entities—in the fashion of big history. But a world-historical view of childhood in the long agricultural period of the human experience has three other related tasks: to treat the impact of the arrival of civilization as an organizational form within agricultural economies; to deal with conditions in particular civilizations through comparisons of cultural and structural differences despite shared reliance on agriculture; and to consider the possibility of significant change within an ongoing agricultural context, before the challenge of more fully modern conditions. We’ll proceed with these tasks—standard tasks in world history, but not systematically applied to childhood—in order: civilization first, then comparative civilization, then additional change which also maintains the comparative theme with some special attention to developments in western Europe in this context. The advent of civilization, with increased importance of cities amid a rural majority, with writing, and with other structural changes, had three implications for childhood. First, organized states issued formal law codes that usually tied children to the social group in which they were born. This may not have been a 24 Peter N. Stearns, Old Age in European Society: The Case of France (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976).

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new practice, but the codification was clearer: thus, most obviously, children of slaves were slaves. Law codes also more formally defined childhood, obligations to children, and children’s obligations in turn. Many early civilizations used laws to emphasize the importance of obedience. Not only Mesopotamian but also Jewish law specified the rights of fathers to punish disobedient sons; in Jewish law, this could include execution: parents could publicly proclaim that a boy was “stubborn and rebellious” and “all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die.”25 Finally, early civilizations had writing, and for a small minority of children this meant schooling. Mesopotamian clay tablets survive that record the lessons of students and also parental admonitions for them to buckle down. They record canings of laggards—like the boy who was late to class, frightened and with a pounding heart, who is beaten in consequence while his teacher also invites himself to dinner. In all agricultural civilizations, schooling becomes an important differentiator within childhood, particularly because of majority dependence on children for work: it distinguishes different social groups, and it often adds to the separation between genders.26 While it’s clear that different early civilizations approached childhood in certain distinctive ways—the Phoenicians, for example, practiced some child sacrifice for religious purposes, though this was unusual; Egyptians did not engage in infanticide, which amazed Greek visitors—documentation is not rich enough to make extensive comparisons very meaningful. For this, we turn to the next world history phase, the classical period from about 1000 B.C.E. to 500 C.E. or so. Here, with larger civilizations constructing characteristic cultures and institutions that would long endure, comparison becomes a central analytical obligation, and its application to childhood raises intriguing possibilities. World history teaching, and a certain amount of scholarship, characteristically approaches the classical civilizations in terms of Deuteronomy 21:18-21 KJV. A. R. Colon with P. A. Colon, A History of Children: A Socio-cultural Survey across Millennia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). 25 26

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considerable contrast. Chinese science, more pragmatic than theoretical Greek science; Indian and, usually, Mediterranean political decentralization as opposed to Chinese centralization; the Indian caste system in contrast to Mediterranean slavery and Confucian rankings in China; Indian religiosity as against the more secular cultures of elites in China and the Mediterranean— the list is a long one, and it applies to a wide range of institutions and behaviors, from political through intellectual to social and even technological history. It’s recognized, of course, that there are also common components: all three classical civilizations were recurrently expansionist, they all worked hard to integrate expanded territories through a mix of cultural, political and commercial linkages, and they were all patriarchal. The question is: For any less-explored topic like childhood, which emphasis—contrast or commonality—best conveys the dominant comparative framework? We’ll explore this by laying out one case from China and then offering a classical Mediterranean comparison. Two principal factors shaped potentially distinctive characteristics of childhood in China, one quite predictable, the other less so. Confucianism, backed by the state from the Han dynasty onward, had several impacts. It surrounded childhood, particularly in the upper classes, with elaborate ceremony. Children were expected to greet parents formally each day, asking if they were sufficiently cool in summer, warm enough in winter. Periodic rituals in extended families could be quite detailed: e.g., the oldest son had to go to the left of the door, the oldest daughter to the right of the door (both facing south) and all their brothers and sisters had to bow to them.27 Confucianism encouraged family solidarity over children’s individuality; Chinese art and stories, accordingly, depicted children as ideal types, not as particulars. From the general culture also came the strong insistence on obedience, and in law Chinese parents had virtually untrammeled rights of discipline—even up to killing a child with only mild punishment in return, while children could be executed for moderate indiscipline. A widely quoted saying held that “no parents in the 27 Anne Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995).

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world are wrong.” And Confucianism, finally, placed great importance on education for the elite, particularly males, encouraging a sense of parental obligation to keep children diligent in their schoolwork.28 The second defining feature of Chinese childhood had more to do with family arrangements, sometimes in a certain tension with Confucian preachings. The practice of husbands taking concubines could lead to bitter disputes among children of different mothers. One authority says that since the mothers have strong feelings, the sons become separate groups. Equally important was the unusually strong attachment children developed for mothers. This reflected the larger emphasis on loyalty to parents, but with a maternally based emotional twist that may have developed in implicit reaction against some Confucian characteristics. Fathers were rarely held in the same kind of regard, perhaps because of their hierarchical role. A picture from the Han dynasty showed the ideal of deep, lifelong devotion to mother: an aged woman is poised to beat her adult son, who is so devoted that his only concern is the possibility that his frail mother might hurt herself while hitting him. Attachments were formed that could not be predicted by Confucianism but had a strong impact on both childhood and personality.29 Classical Mediterranean societies did not offer such a convenient cultural package as Confucianism within which contemporaries could frame childhood or from which modern historians can derive a point of entry to this often-private subject. Happily, a great deal of historical scholarship on Greece and particularly Rome provides intriguing data which permit a comparative venture. Using China as point of departure, three features of childhood in the classical Mediterranean stand out. (This is in addition to some important differences in the nature of available sources and some significant internal regional variations—for example, in the 28 Michael Loewe, Everyday Life in Early Imperial China During the Han Period 202 B.C.–A.D. 220 (New York: Putnam, 1968). 29 Patricia Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History (London: Routledge, 2003).

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childhoods of Sparta, where infanticide does not seem to have been practiced, compared to those of Athens.) •

First, the classical Mediterranean records far less evidence of intense attachments of children to parents, and more particularly to mothers, than emerges in China in the same period. This does not mean that, as part of individual experiences, the attachments never formed; simply that they do not stand out as norms. In many households, especially at the elite level, the number of adults with whom children interacted, often including wetnurses, diffused children’s emotional focus probably to a greater extent than occurred in China. Fathers, though disciplinary figures, were more likely to become involved in early childhood, another distraction from maternal focus. And Mediterranean families were somewhat less stable than their Chinese counterparts, with more frequent divorce or disruption at least by Roman times. At the same time there was less internal rivalry between, for example, wife and concubine, of the sort that drove Chinese mothers to their intense focus on their offspring. Emotional standards and interactions were somewhat different.30

•

The artistic styles developed in Greece and Rome, with their commitment to delineating individual features, spilled over into representations of childhood. (This may, admittedly, reflect an even deeper interest in children’s individuality; there is a question here of which came first, the style or the approach to childhood.) Children figure frequently on friezes and other artistic presentations, and their images are far less stylized than is the case in Chinese art.31

•

Greek and particularly Roman discussions of childhood involved a far more open concern about youth than occurred in China, where Confucianism may have presented ideals of hierarchy and obedience so strict that they limited open discussion. Mediterranean culture involved

30 Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 31 Geoffrey Nathan, The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sarah Pomeroy, Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Beryl Rawson, Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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Against these intriguing differences, deriving from variations both in culture and in family structure, stand a number of similarities all the more striking in that the two societies had no meaningful contact of any sort. Some of the similarities are fairly predictable, but others suggest a deeper commonality in childhood than one would expect from such different cultures and political systems. Several obvious similarities followed from birth control needs and the high infant death rates characteristic of agricultural societies. Female infanticide was widely used. Estimates run as high as 20 percent of all girls born in Athens. Rome may have indulged a bit less, but also disposed of some boys; and the Roman Empire (like its Chinese counterpart) did pass laws against the practice, 32 Emiel Eyben, Restless Youth in Ancient Rome, trans. Patrick Daly (London: Routledge, 1993).

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though with few teeth. Romans also experimented with some contraception and abortion. As in China, deaths of young children were not given much notice. One author, Epictetus, commented, “When you kiss your child, you say to yourself, ‘Perhaps it will be dead in the morning.’” The Roman writer Plutarch noted that when infants died, people are not present long at their funerals or keep watch at their graves. Ceremonies existed to mark the birth of a child, after about eight days, with a necklace, or bulla, offered to ward off evil spirits.33 As in China, classical Mediterranean families also conducted ceremonies to mark boys’ maturity at around age fifteen; in Rome, these involved adopting adult clothing—the toga—and removing the bulla. Little literary attention was devoted to young children, and scant interest appeared in medical writings. The classical Mediterranean strongly emphasized distinctions between boys and girls, though again as in China these were not in fact absolute. Boys were far more likely to be schooled, but upper class girls sometimes had tutors, and a few schools existed. In both classical societies, again unsurprisingly, access to schooling distinguished upper from lower classes, though some interest in schooling as a means of advancing children’s future career prospects spread below the elites. The content of schooling differed between China and the Mediterranean—attention to rhetoric and oratory was notable in Greece and Rome—but both societies featured considerable interest in political history and literary classics and a strong emphasis on memorization. And while the manners imposed on elite children may have been somewhat less elaborate in the Mediterranean than in Confucian China, instruction in “the way to walk . . . the way to eat” was an important part of responsible upbringing.34 Discipline and obedience loomed large, a clear but less predictable feature of the two classical civilizations. Advice, literature, and the law emphasized parental and particularly paternal From his Art of Living (San Francisco: Harper, 1997), p. 42; see also Suzanne Dixon, ed., Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001). 34 Rawson, Marriage. 33

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authority by asking, Who can raise sons unless he is like a master over them?; or by stating that the father and the master are one and the same. Confucian overtones in China were matched by these references to slavery in the Mediterranean: the language differed, but the result was the same. Even elite parents, sending their sons to tutors and then schools, assumed that harsh discipline was essential to keep the boys in line. The atmosphere imposed on children used for work, in other words, carried over even to the minority of privileged offspring provided with education, and there was no assumption that children as a category were likely to enjoy learning.35 No more than in China did Mediterranean culture evidence any particular appreciation of childish qualities. Adults saw some limited value in children’s innocence and playfulness—toys were often provided, and children had special functions in religious festivals. But many leading thinkers, including Plato and Aristotle, urged the early regulation of play, and overall the child was most appreciated who showed an adultlike seriousness. The main reason that storks were associated with children involved a belief that young storks assisted their parents. Romans often praised the puer senex (“old child”); the author Pliny singled out a girl for her mature sense of discretion and her matronly modesty. Children existed to work (or study) and to prepare to carry on the family line, not to express personal ambition or individuality. Laws, aside from enshrining parental authority and promoting goals of family harmony under parental direction, were mainly designed to make sure children had appropriate access to property, which was so crucial to their ability to maintain the family; considerable Roman legislation was thus aimed at defining property rights for illegitimate children or adoptees or to defining the social status of children born to mixed parents, one slave and one free. The widespread concern about youth reflected a fundamental interest in promoting acceptance of family authority and as rapid a maturation as possible.36

35 36

Rawson, Children. Dixon, Childhood; Rawson, Children.

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Indeed, both China and the Mediterranean urged an early but dependent adulthood. Early marriage (at age twelve for girls in Rome) was possible in both societies, to take one example. Yet Roman writers defined not only a period of youth but a period of young adulthood into the mid-thirties, in which people were still not capable of reliable reason—a good basis for continued assertion of mature adult control, similar to patterns recommended in China and reflecting the hope of keeping young people useful to their older parents in the larger context of agricultural society. Finally, following from this general framework, childhood was rarely singled out as a desirable state by those who had passed through it—again, an intriguing similarity between the two classical societies. Adult reminiscences in the Mediterranean rarely mentioned childhood, sharing this quality with Chinese comment that was characteristically sparse except occasionally in reference to mothers.37 On balance, classical childhoods had more common features than contrasts across civilizations, though there were certainly some intriguing nuances like Chinese motherlove or the Mediterranean preoccupation with youth. Different cultures produced surprisingly few distinctions in childhood, as against a common desire to make children as useful as possible; while also acknowledging the high death rate; and to limit childish perturbations accordingly. Were we also to consider classical India—the available scholarship is a bit skimpier—the impact of culture would loom larger. Hinduism, as it gradually developed, encouraged a view of the child as an individual, part of the religious community once appropriate ceremonies were performed, initially after the first few days. This in turn encouraged a far more indulgent approach to young children than prevailed in China or the Mediterranean, including a great aversion to the use of physical discipline. Religion, in other words, loomed larger than the more secular cultures of the other two societies in shaping some distinctive features for childhood.38 Rawson, Children. Jeanine Ruboyer, Daily Life in Ancient India from Approximately 200 B.C. to 700 A.D., trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Macmillan, 1965). 37 38

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Even in China and the Mediterranean, individual families might modify the framework with unusual affection or a delight in sharing children’s play. In both societies, some sense of greater indulgence for children emerged over time, including during the imperial period in Rome or the postclassical Tang dynasty in China, and perhaps reflecting new options with enhanced prosperity and political stability. A few Roman writers, for example, talked about how parents were “spoiling children from the cradle.”39 But this tentative trend merely enhanced the sense of surprising similarity between these two major classical societies, modified only by a few revealing distinctions that followed from different cultures and family structures. Granting the desirability of more explicit comparative analysis, it seems probable that the basic imperatives of agricultural civilizations—the need to rely on the labor, and so the obedience, of older children; the use of legal codes to express and, to a degree, enforce children’s inferiority; the obvious basic distinction between elite and ordinary childhoods around the presence or absence of significant education— overrode the impact of different belief systems and even some aspects of family structure. At the same time, major political distinctions had little impact, both because the state was rather removed from ordinary family life and because otherwise different legal systems conjoined in emphasizing strong parental authority. There was far less variation among childhoods in the classical civilizations than there had been in the more scattered hunting and gathering societies, where less need for child labor permitted a wider range of options. Until about 300 C.E., then, the world history tally goes as follows concerning change, continuity, and variation in childhoods: tremendous significance to the shift from foraging to agriculture; a lesser but noticeable impact when civilization, as an organizational form, was added to agriculture; far less result however from the qualities of specific classical civilizations. One test remains for agricultural childhoods: the impact of the spread of major world religions, as a general phenomenon and as a new differentiator. 39

Rawson, Children.

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The postclassical period in world history, 600–1450, involves several major changes, and it is worthwhile asking which of them had much potential impact on childhood: again, to my knowledge, a novel inquiry. Patterns already established in places like China and India persisted in many ways—for example, the reliance on a certain amount of female infanticide in China—so change should not be exaggerated; and always, major societies continued to operate within the agricultural context with its heavy dependence on child labor. Distinguishing characteristics in this new period include the emergence of much closer trade connections among many parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. For many world historians this is a benchmark development, but it is not clear how much impact it had on childhood, aside from encouraging urban growth which in turn involved a larger minority of children in manufacturing and street activities. Specific trade patterns, for example in the Mongol subperiod, again do not bear obviously on childhood. The geography of civilization expanded, embracing Japan, Russia, and northern Europe, along with additional parts of Africa and the Americas; this meant that more children were affected by civilization’s characteristics, but these had already been established elsewhere. At most, efforts to imitate older civilizations, like Japan’s emulation of China, may have had a limited effect, particularly of course on educational styles. There was some tendency toward deterioration in conditions for women, evinced most obviously in the gradual spread of footbinding in China and the practice (though not typical) of sati in India. Here children could be directly involved, and to the extent that gendering became more pronounced—as has been argued for Europe, Japan, and the Middle East—childhood was surely affected. But the innovation with greatest potential for childhood involved the spread of the great missionary religions, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, including of course the very birth and then extraordinary success of the last. Quite simply, religion became a more important force in many people’s lives during the postclassical period. A more religious age, in turn, generated some

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common changes in approaches to childhood but also a new series of comparative distinctions. Writings in each of the major religions—as before in Judaism—emphasized the importance of children. Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism, featured the pride and responsibility of parenthood and particularly fatherhood. Christianity, with trinitarian fatherhood, placed special emphasis here, though the balance with the powerful maternal image of Mary needs to be noted as well. All the religions stressed the importance of obedience to parents: as in the biblical “honor thy father and mother.” The religions shared two other features. All, in one way or another, stressed a divine element in every human being—a soul, or some participation in the divine essence. This belief in turn enhanced the sense of responsibility for protecting children as God’s creatures or participants in a divine connection and as future faithful. The major religions, and also Judaism, vigorously opposed infanticide and almost surely reduced the practice or promoted such evasions as placing an unwanted or impoverished child on the doorstep of a religious building (which often led to death). One of Christianity’s first impacts on childhood in the Roman Empire was its encouragement of unprecedented new laws outlawing infanticide or the sale of children, stipulating severe punishments for violations. It was a Christian emperor, in 374, who decreed that if any man or woman should kill an infant, that crime should be punishable by death; and the early Christian emperors generally greatly expanded the legislation applied to children. A similar protection of children, beginning with a new prohibition of infanticide, was prominent from the outset in Islam.40 Finally, the world religions all paid attention to the need for religious training for children, providing particular rituals to begin the connection between children and the religion—like baptism in Christianity, or rubbing the infant’s palate with dates to transfer blessings in Middle Eastern Islam—and then, at least for some children, opportunities for more formal religious education. For many lower class families reliant on child labor, this 40

Rawson, Children.

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might involve little more than a memorized prayer or two, though Islamic families tried hard to send boys, at least, for a brief period in a mosque program or Quranic school. For a minority, all the religions provided rich doctrines and legal codes that could inspire serious schooling. Schooling almost certainly expanded under the religious aegis while taking on new directions. By 1000, outside of the Confucian regions, almost all schooling occurred under religious guidance and, at least officially, for primarily religious purposes. Each religion also, however, brought some particular emphases to childhood, and there is no escaping the need to return to comparison. One may be pardoned for a bit of defensive caution: differences in doctrine did not necessarily affect actual practices, given wide variations in religious knowledge and interest even in these centuries of conversion. Children, obviously, were effectively raised in all the religions, so we should try to refrain from either historical or sectarian value judgments. But there were differences, and the result produces a comparative picture that differs from the findings for the classical period. The new level of religious commitment, in other words, despite sharing some key implications for childhood, overrode more of the common features of agricultural civilizations, producing a more varied picture of childhood in the postclassical period than that which had described the centuries before. The cultural force of the religious wave and the obvious applicability of the expanding religions to childhood had somewhat greater results than earlier cultural systems had generated. The new round of comparison most obviously highlights a number of intriguing distinctions between Christianity and Islam. Christianity, though variably depending on the strain involved, believed in original sin; Islam did not. Muslim writers uniformly agreed that a newborn who died went to Paradise; there had not been time for sin, children were born innocent, and in any event Allah is merciful. Muhammad’s own kindness to children was often cited, though so was that of Christ. There was also no aversion to sexuality in Islam, so while children, particularly girls, might be rigorously monitored to protect virginity before mar-

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riage, there was no need to impute an evil nature to childhood sexuality.41 Where might these differences lead? There seems to have been more emphasis on the indulgence of young children, catering to their whims, in Islamic than in Christian society during the postclassical period, though this partly reflected greater prosperity. Children, both boys and girls, were more fully entrusted to mothers before age seven (unless a boy showed early aptitude for religious study), which might have encouraged this pattern irrespective of religion. More interesting is a greater debate within Islam than in most other societies about the appropriateness of physical discipline. No doubt about it: parents and schoolmasters in Islam spanked and caned; on the other side of the coin, undue excess in beating children was reproved in Christianity. But many Islamic commentators, like the great historian Ibn Khaldun, urged careful restraint, arguing that beatings only made children evasive and lethargic. And Islamic law carefully stipulated what beating was appropriate for what offense and insisted that not only the face but also the hands not be touched; this surely reflected Islam’s greater legalistic precision overall, but was there also involved a greater concern for children’s rights? Finally, in the period 1300–1600 Islam saw an unusual flowering of books of consolation for parental grief on the death of a child. Titles like “Book of Anxiety about Children’s Death” and “Consolation for Those in Distress on the Death of Children” had no common counterparts in Christianity. The series undoubtedly reflected the advent of more epidemic disease, beginning with the Black Death that hit the Middle East in the fourteenth century before reaching Europe; but did it also show a growing emotional attachment?42 It’s important in all this to avoid exaggeration and also, at this point in our knowledge, to admit considerable ignorance. Actual Christian parents may have felt just as much grief as their Muslim 41 Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, ed., Children in the Muslim Middle East (Austin: University of Texas, 1995). 42 Avner Gil’adi, Children of Islam: Concepts of Childhood in Medieval Muslim Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

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counterparts when a child died of bubonic plague; the difference may have reflected public posture alone. Many Muslim children, like their Christian counterparts, experienced their fathers as distant figures and harsh disciplinarians, whatever the distinctions amid debates about punishment and religious rules. Original sin existed in Christianity, and it unquestionably helped inspire a use of fear in the disciplining of young children; how different in practice was the situation in Islam? We know, in sum, that religion had an impact: the new emphasis on the inclusion of children in the religious community introduced huge changes in the treatment of young children in principle and to an extent in practice. At the same time, differences among the major religions also opened new comparative distinctions affecting childhood, and perhaps actual children as well. There is by the same token abundant room for further research and analysis as we begin to take childhood more seriously as a historical topic. One final comparison still within the framework of agricultural civilizations must be addressed, relating both to an old debate and to the new plea for comparative study: was there something particularly strange about the way childhood developed in premodern western Europe? As the history of childhood opened up under Philippe Ariès the initial answer to this question, as we noted before, was yes: the premodern West was distinctive by modern standards, and rather dreadful as well. Children were often worked excessively hard, beaten, their deaths not clearly mourned, their visibility in society limited in such expressions as family portraits except insofar as they could be portrayed as little adults. And this pattern began to change only in the eighteenth century. Then of course came the revisionist response, showing that parents often gloried in their children, that European laws did recognize childhood and protect it in some respects. Fathers in premodern England were often so pleased at a child’s birth that they sent out congratulatory letters; Martin Luther was emotionally shattered when one of his children died. There were community rules on discipline, and cases of excessive abuse were,

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some have argued, rarer than in modern times. The bleak Ariès picture began to fade.43 What this debate did not undertake, however, is what I would argue now becomes possible with a comparative, world-historical approach: the key question may not be whether childhood in premodern Europe was different from modern—where we know the answer is yes it was, but not so different as to omit parental affection and social concern. The key question might be: was childhood in premodern Europe, particularly in the postclassical but also the early modern period into the eighteenth century, different from childhood in other agricultural civilizations? Even on this more relevant debate we need some care. We have already seen that agricultural childhoods everywhere involved great reliance on child labor, everywhere involved fairly strict discipline and insistence on obedience, everywhere exposed major gender distinctions, everywhere distinguished between schooling for a minority and work for most. Europe here fit the mold. This said, the probability of significant difference deserves exploration. We’ve already explored one factor in Christianity’s insistence on original sin. With Protestantism, emphasis on images of death and damnation as disciplinary tools for children clearly expanded. But there is a second element, recently revived from the vantage point of gender but deserving attention for childhood as well: from the late Middle Ages onward, western Europe developed a distinctive type of family, with (for the majority) late marriage—age twenty-six to twentyseven on the average—and a significant group who could not marry at all. Underlying the European style family was probably a fierce desire to protect landholdings from too many heirs; people should wait to marry until they came into property, and this in turn would cut some years off the effective birth rate.44 43 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; Pollock, Forgotten Children; Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 44 Mary Hartman, Households and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (New York: Cambrige University Press, 2004).

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The resulting family placed unusual emphasis on the nuclear unit, parents and children, with grandparents absent because of their advanced age when their adult children began having offspring of their own. This in turn led to further differences between childhood in western Europe and that in Asia and Africa. In the first place, there was less parental or adult attention available for young children, simply because the adults had to work so hard in the absence of the kind of family labor force a more extended arrangement would provide. Many European infants were not only swaddled—many societies did this, including the Middle East—but hung on hooks on the wall so mothers could work freely without worrying about their safety.45 At the other end of childhood, the European style family created a prolonged period of youth: years in which people who were biologically adult, capable of supporting themselves, could not achieve maturity and often could not have normal sexual outlets because they lacked access to property. In contrast, Middle Eastern families worked to reduce youth; not greatly caring for teenage exuberance, they rushed apprenticeships and encouraged early marriage under extended family control. Lengthy European youth raised some unusual tensions, with rowdy festivals, hostilities with aging fathers, and certainly with a number of issues concerning collective controls over sexual behavior; but it may have had some advantages as well.46 Very tentatively, then, the idea of a distinctive European childhood, particularly by the time of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, deriving partly from religion and even more from family type, deserves further exploration. This is not a rehash of the outmoded modern-premodern debate, but the outcome of comparisons suitably directed at agricultural civilizations more generally. If the distinctiveness stands up to a new discussion, the implications are intriguing: First, of course, for premodern Europe itself—are there echoes of distinctive childhoods in larger social institutions or the qualities of adults? But second, for the later process of modern change. For the first huge dents in 45 46

Hunt, Parents and Children. John Gillis, Youth in History.

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agricultural childhood would occur in Europe, as the second lecture will discuss. Were the drawbacks of the European model itself an incitement to change? (It may have been no accident that an early reformer target was original sin, in turn a nonissue in many other cultures.) And as Europe did change, did it retain some vestiges of earlier distinctions? Much is made, for example, of the modern Western discovery of adolescence, and there are new elements in the concept; but did it also hark back to an unusual legacy of youth and youthful waywardness? The picture of the West itself often shifts somewhat through a world-historical lens, and childhood is an intriguing case in point. The obvious emphasis in dealing with childhood in the long agricultural period of world history must be on the contrast with what would come next—the unfolding of a different, modern version of this inescapable human phenomenon. How and when and why did childhood change from the agricultural model, and with what gains and losses for the people involved, and with what tensions and hesitations during the transition period itself? These questions will form the core of the next paper, focused on the truly significant, though still emerging, iteration of a dramatically novel form of childhood. But we must not dismiss the agricultural phase of world history simply as a backdrop to modern change. In the first place, we have seen that there were significant shifts and intriguing variations within the agricultural framework. While agriculture itself constitutes the first big change, with its new birth rates and new uses of children setting a powerful and durable framework for childhood, the advent of civilizations and the impact of major religions introduced important adjustments. Particular cultures and religions had their own contributions, shaping rather different approaches, for example, to the common need to utilize youth labor for family benefit or the issue of adjusting birth rates to available resources. Several of the standard world history markers influenced childhood while maintaining the criteria of an agricultural economy. Indeed, childhood reflects findings common in world history more generally: certain changes that respond to crosscutting forces, like the advent of organized civilizations or

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the spread of world religions, but also variations that reflect particular experiences and impulses in regional societies—the usual combination of the local and the global. There are other reasons not to race from agriculture to modernity too recklessly. Even with modernity, not everything would change: there were aspects of childhood inherent in the human condition—sexual maturation as an individual experience but also a social problem, for example—that must not be lost with an undue enthusiasm for change. Quite apart from biological and psychological constants, there are also explicit heritages of the agricultural centuries still operating in modern childhood. We assume, to take an obvious example, that school should pause during much of the summer, a direct legacy from the transitional period in which schooling was added to childhood but with direct concessions to the need for ongoing child labor during the most demanding season. This summer interruption is being rethought a bit, as school crosses into the season more and more often, but it remains as a reminder of the agricultural past. Preferences for boys over girls, another legacy of agricultural patriarchy, continue to surface in many societies, perhaps particularly ones in which the transition to the modern is still recent, as in China. Insistence on obedience and its disciplinary accompaniments, those hallmarks of childhood in agricultural societies, have obviously been rethought in many modern societies, but the hand of the past persists as well. There are also ongoing legacies from the particular versions of agricultural childhood that maintain a hold in specific regions. We will note in the next paper the unusual commitment of South and Southeast Asia to the continued use of children for work: this is due primarily to regional economic circumstances in the contemporary global economy, but is there also a cultural or familial legacy from the agricultural centuries that makes child labor more durable here than, say, in the Middle East or East Asia? American historians have traced important continuities between contemporary evangelical Christians, with their continued emphasis on original sin and their management of children—often including considerable physical discipline and invocation of fear—and the

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particular approach to children that emerged—not uniformly but widely—from the Protestant Reformation. Philip Greven, most particularly, believes he’s identified continuities in today’s evangelical minority from at least the seventeenth century, in the continued belief in the need for strict physical discipline and a barely contained anger in parent-child relations, modified only by some concessions to more contemporary rhetoric and law.47 Urban Africans persist in a delight in carrying young children as their ancestors did in the fields, in contrast to the greater physical separation common in other modern versions of childhood. We’ve already noted the obvious point about unusual Chinese commitment, particularly of course in the countryside, to traditional gender preferences among children. Christian and Muslim concerns for children’s souls still show in frequent opposition to abortion. Approaches to modernity in childhood, not at all surprisingly, are conditioned by the beliefs and practices established during the agricultural centuries. These beliefs and practices, in turn, mark off different variants of the modern experience. Here too are abundant opportunities for further research and reflection. The agricultural versions of childhood were powerful and effective formulations, altering previous practices inherited from foraging societies and building persistent traditions in turn. Even societies that seem largely to have cast off the agricultural legacy, like the United States, express some doubts and anxieties about the disappearance of this past. We know, as modern Americans, that children are no longer supposed to work: we’ve largely resolved this important change. But many American adults still wonder just slightly if children should not be working a bit more than they do, in aid of the modern version of the family economy and the household. We don’t, for the most part, act on this concern; we carefully let children sleep on Saturday mornings, while the parents clean house. But we’re not sure this is quite right, and we sometimes implicitly resent the disappearance of agricultural obligations—including a less-debated obedience from children Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 47

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themselves. For their part, though implicitly given blissful ignorance of this aspect of social history, children themselves sometimes grope for meaning in a society where the gap between childhood and adulthood is much greater than in the agricultural past. Here too, if obscure and not always very useful, are legacies from the childhood of some centuries ago, whose deeply rooted patterns leave an imprint still.

Lecture 2

Childhood Amid Modernization and Globalization

A few initial vignettes on modern childhood and youth. Every modern society, and ultimately the world as a whole, has experienced vigorous debates about the justifiability of children’s work, and about social versus familial rights to determine this work. Tradition and a great deal of ongoing need argued for work. Modernity pushed for education and often cited childish innocence and vulnerability as key arguments against work, seen as harmful to children and costly to the future prospects of individuals and society at large. The discussion could display some silly proportions, which suggested how challenging the idea of this particular innovation was. In France in the 1830s, where the debate raged prior to the first law limiting child labor in 1841, factory owners argued against confining the work of children under age twelve to eight hours, because it would not mesh with the work day for adults. Almost no one was yet brash enough to argue that young children’s work should be abolished outright, so the question of harmonizing child with adult patterns seemed serious enough. A reformer, J. J. Bourcart, pointed out that two shifts of children could be organized, at seven to eight hours each, thus gaining a real change, including some chance for a bit of education, without disrupting the adult factory schedules. Manufacturers greeted this idea as an imaginative gem: Just think of making 39

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child work different from adult work! What a stroke of genius! And so, at least in principle, some of the most forward looking in their number began to agree to the idea of reform.1 In Germany, around the 1880s, unskilled workers were often ridiculed by their more skilled and experienced colleagues because they did not seem to know how to stop having children, thus making their economic lives harder than they already were. Skilled workers, in contrast, knew about what they revealingly called “Parisian devices”—condoms—that began to dissociate sex from procreation at a time when having the traditional number of children was making no sense. This was the same period in which one unskilled worker, Moritz Bromme, reported how his discontented wife paced through their crowded, one-room apartment, looking at their seven kids and muttering about how she wished some of them would die.2 When Japan adopted mass education in 1872, following Western models and building on its own recent tradition of extensive schooling, it found that other new ideas about children came along with this innovation, some of course also imported from the West. Soon, Japanese experts were contending that parents needed advice and guidance in order to deal properly with children—instinct and tradition were not enough, for children were tender flowers that needed special protection; that special playgrounds should be built to organize children’s activities, which otherwise would fall short of developmental goals; and that other institutions, like special laws and courts for juveniles, were essential to reflect the special needs and vulnerabilities attached to childhood, even childhood gone astray. One major change, in other words, seemed to generate a larger recasting of ideas of what childhood was all about.3 1 Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health, and Education among the “Classes Populaires” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); J. J. Bourcart, De travail des jeunes ouvriers (Paris, 1840). 2 Moritz Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbieters (Leipzig, 1905). See also Peter N. Stearns, Lives of Labor: Work in a Maturing Industrial Society (London: Holmes & Meier, 1975). 3 Brian Platt, “ Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood,” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): forthcoming.

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During the later nineteenth century, doctors in a number of industrializing societies in western Europe and North America began to identify an apparently new disease among young, largely middle class women: the refusal to eat adequately that is called anorexia nervosa. There is some debate about how new this disease was: possibly extreme religious fasting among young women in earlier societies may have been a variant of the same disorder. But modern anorexia seems to have spread initially as an implicit protest against some of the stresses and constraints associated with modern girlhood, including new levels of loving parental interference and control. It spread further when beauty standards began more stringently to emphasize slenderness. Many girls lost confidence in their own bodies, and felt against all evidence that they were drastically overweight. By the later twentieth century anorexia was spreading to many societies. One of the early results of the advent of television and Western media fare in the Pacific Islands was a huge increase in anorexia and bulimia, as local girls contrasted their bodies with the standards being touted on screen. Modern youth involved new opportunities but important new tensions and problems as well.4 In 2000 a young American Peace Corps teacher was working in an eastern Russian village that had never seen an American before, and that had no computer or Internet connection. Despite their isolation, her students reported a very precise notion of who was the most beautiful woman in the world, and their choice was Britney Spears. In the same year, an anthropologist, working in Madagascar with teenagers and youth in an urban slum, realized that her subjects had a very definite idea of the beauty products young women should seek: those that would make them look more like, you guessed it, Britney Spears. A global youth culture was defining many of the goals and standards of young people in a host of diverse societies, many of them arguably quite backward. Another sign of fundamental change.5 4 Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 5 Jennifer Cole, “The Jaombilo of Toamasina (Madagascar): Globalization, Agency, and the Transformation of Youthful Gender Relations,” Journal of Social

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This essay discusses two waves of change that have affected childhood and youth on a worldwide, though hardly uniform, basis over the past two centuries. The second wave largely yet not entirely reinforces the first. Wave one was the conversion of childhood from the conditions of agricultural society to those of industrial society. The transformation developed first in western Europe and much of North America, beginning in the later eighteenth century. It then spread, partly by deliberate imitation, to other parts of the world. For shorthand, this first set of changes, the most fundamental, can be termed a modernization of childhood so long as it is understood that modern does not mean necessarily better and that not all societies modernize in exactly the same ways or at the same pace. Furthermore, the modernization of childhood is incomplete even today, and some places may hold out for an alternative model, whether traditional or otherwise. Even in societies in which modernized childhood is most familiar, the adjustment to fundamental change continues still. American parents, for example, still worry that schooling may be too burdensome for children, and the nation has arranged a number of accommodations, including a pronounced grade inflation and measures to bolster children’s self-esteem, to help families feel more comfortable with the demands of a school-based childhood.6 Wave two involves globalization outright and has taken shape during the last three or four decades, with some hints, however, earlier. The impact of globalization partly continues the basic process of modernization, promoting further adoption of modern childhoods including additional sponsorship by international organizations. But globalization also disrupts economies in ways that can complicate childhood, and it vigorously promotes a kind

History 38 (Summer 2005): forthcoming. On eastern Russia, personal communication to the author. 6 Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Brian Gill and Steven Schlossman, “A Sin Against Childhood: Progressive Education and the Crusade to Abolish Homework, 1897–1941,” American Journal of Education 105 (1996): 27–66.

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of consumerist childhood that adds considerably to the overall force of change. As a result, it needs to be considered separately. Before spelling out how the modernization of childhood unfolded, including its geographical dispersion, it is important to offer basic definitions lest the forest be lost to the historical trees. In its essence, the modernization of childhood has consisted of three interrelated changes that have a host of implications. Change one, the most basic, involves the conversion of childhood from work to schooling. The idea that children should begin to assist the family economy at a fairly young age, and then should be able to cover the equivalent of their own support and perhaps add resources to the family economy by their middle to late teens, had been fundamental in agricultural societies. It now gave way to the notion that young children should not work at all in favor of going to school and, more gradually, that even teenagers should not work, again with schooling their proper destination. This meant, as many parents quickly realized, that children turned from being on balance economic assets, to becoming absolute economic liabilities, which meant in turn the necessity of some new thinking about the nature and purpose of childhood.7 The transition from work to schooling as primary function of childhood, along with growing urbanization more generally, encouraged the second key shift in the modernization of childhood: the decision to limit family size to unprecedentedly low levels. Agricultural families had usually sought five to seven children; fewer than this risked labor shortages in the family economy, more risked overwhelming family resources. This kind of birth rate was simply inappropriate for conditions in which children cost money rather than producing economic gain, and in which urban characteristics made the oversight of large broods more challenging. Realizing that birth rates should be limited and actually accomplishing these limits were two different things. Many societies went through difficult discussions about what kinds of birth 7 Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education (New York: Knopf, 1961); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

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rate limitation were moral and feasible, whether abortion was permissible, and so on, and specific choices varied from case to case. Indeed, discussions still continue in some societies. But the process has proved to be a central feature of childhood’s modernization, with its implications for altered relationships between adults and children and among children themselves.8 The third basic transition in the modernization of childhood involved the dramatic reduction of the infant death rate from the traditional levels in which 30–50 percent of all children died before the age of two. In terms of timing, the relationship with birth rate fluctuations was variable. In some cases, families reduced birth rates but in the process became far more deeply attached to their hopes that the children would survive. In other instances, infant death rates dropped first, often as a result of improved sanitation and public health measures, which would ultimately trigger a more urgent need to cut the birth rate to compensate.9 Modern childhood thus consists of a major redefinition of function from work to schooling, with attendant revolutions in the number of children in the average family and in the relationship of childhood and death. These fundamental shifts brought additional changes in their wake, again regardless of the time or place in which they occurred. Predictably, the desirable features of the child expanded to include specific attention to intelligence; formal testing provisions and, in most school systems, assignments of grades made it clear that some children were smarter than others in ways that could not help but attract adult and parental attention.10

8 E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993). 9 Wrigley, Population and History; Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins, The Decline of Fertility in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); J. C. Chesnais, Demographic Transition: Stages, Patterns and Economic Implications, trans. Elizabeth and Philip Kreager (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 10 M. M. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1870–1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); A. S. Kaufman, “Intelligence Tests and School Psychology,” Psychology in Schools 33 (2000): 748; Paul Chapman, School as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman Applied Psychology and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1930 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

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Age segregation of children occurred for two reasons. First, most schools allocated children by age to classes or to seat sections within classes. Second, most children now grew up amid relatively few siblings, which reduced crossover relationships by age and also promoted greater interaction with school peers. Formation of social groups by age and fairly rigorous age segregation, modified only in some interactions between males and females, is a pronounced feature of modern childhoods. Age grading also affects the ways many adults think about children. By the twentieth century, initially in the West but soon more broadly, a large body of expertise developed about age-sequenced development patterns, including cognitive skills. This expertise built on and enforced (and many critics would argue, exaggerated) agespecific patterns within and without schooling.11 Larger aspects of the adult-child and parent-child relationship were also affected, though various formulas could result. Schooling could reduce parental control over children—though of course some parents had also relinquished control in agricultural societies. This could occasion concern, particularly when schools were seen as representing social class, ethnic or religious values different from those of the family.12 On the other hand, parental contacts with very young children were often enhanced. With lower birth rates (and more schooling taking girls out of the home) there were fewer siblings available to oversee younger children, and more direct attention occurred between the young child and the adult. Either more parental care or some alternative, such as day care or paid help, became essential in this situation, and this could also affect the pleasures and anxieties associated with the adult role. Finally, declining birth and death rates probably increased parental attachments to individual children. There is 11 The guru on age specificity in learning is Jean Piaget; see for example his Child’s Conception of the World (Savage, MD: Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks, 1989); for the common American educational translation of age grading, see Benjamin Bloom, ed., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956). 12 Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968; New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).

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need for caution here; parents in agricultural societies usually loved young children deeply and deeply mourned their loss. With fewer children, however, and with each young child far less likely to die, emotional investment in the individual child probably rose on average. Certainly, though this is an economic as well as an emotional statement, parental inclination to indulge children in low birth rate cohorts tends to increase, and evidence of this runs from the West of the late eighteenth century onward, to China of the late twentieth century.13 The modernization of childhood had implications for gender, though these too could be handled in complex fashion. The objective necessity for gender distinctions among children gradually declined. With children less aligned with work assignments and their gender basis, and with less emphasis on motherhood for girls, at least in a quantitative sense given lower birth rates, the need to stress radically different orientations for boys and girls was at least redefined. And the fact was, though often only hesitantly realized, that girls and boys could perform with roughly equal skill at school, the new childhood function; indeed, girls might turn out to have an edge. All of this could be masked by assertions that girls and boys should study largely different subjects—no engineering for girls but instead home economics, even separate reading books (as in late nineteenth-century France) that would tell girls about their special familial and supportive responsibilities.14 Or, when girls and boys were plunged together as in 1920s American coeducation, other devices like separate activities, distinctive clothing, and distinctive colors (it was at this point that American consumer culture introduced pink for girls, blue for boys) could emphasize how different the genders were in childhood.15 But the fact was that the traditional basis for arguing 13 Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); see also Stearns, Anxious Parents. 14 Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany: State University of New York, 1984). 15 Julia Grant, “A ‘Real Boy’ and not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood and Masculinity, 1890–1940,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 829–51. See also David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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about gender among children had changed, and even with contrary efforts the gap might gradually narrow in practice as well. It is tempting to argue, finally, that the modernization of childhood created greater separations between childhood and adulthood than had been true of agricultural society. In agricultural society, most children, after infancy, were engaged with work alongside adults and in functions that would clearly lead to adult roles. Of course they were not adults, they lacked the power and property of adults and frequently the full range of skills as well; and of course they were subject to adult supervision and often harsh discipline. But they, and adults as well, could clearly see childhood as a way station toward the next phase of life. The modern emphasis on schooling set childhood apart more fully. To be sure, adults argued and some children could discern that schooling was a preparation for adult jobs and roles. But the connections could be fairly abstract, and in reality most of the child’s day was now spent apart from the adult’s world—the “real world” as Americans came rather revealingly to call it. This separation could color adult attitudes toward children, as childhood could come to appear as an odd combination of privilege and vulnerability. It could complicate children’s efforts to establish meaning in their own lives, probably encouraging types of stress and even mental disorders that were far less common (as far as we know) amid more traditional childhoods.16 The basic modernization of childhood is easy to define: school, less death, fewer children in the overall population and in individual families. The consequences that almost inevitably resulted from these simple but fundamental changes are harder to capture, and they could be actively shaped by particular social and cultural patterns. Nevertheless, a dramatically new set of issues did emerge, ranging from children’s social life to gender and even mental health. William Kirk, Adolescent Suicide: A School-Based Approach to Assessment & Intervention (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Paul R. Robbins, Adolescent Suicide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998); Victor Bailey, “This Rash Act”: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 16

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Modern childhood first emerged in Western society in association with major developments ranging from the Enlightenment to industrialization. From a world history standpoint this Western origin may seem suspect. World historians are quite properly skeptical about too much emphasis on the West and Western leadership. In this case, however, the West did pioneer some major changes that would ultimately become global. It is important to hedge this statement with the simultaneous recognition that not all facets of modern Western childhood were picked up by other societies, and that many societies are still debating whether to accept the modern childhood package at all. We are not claiming some simple-minded Westernization of the world. But Western origins do require some initial attention. The advent of modernity in Western childhood was prepared by some significant cultural developments in the later seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries. Two kinds of rethinking presaged the actual structural changes in childhood, unquestionably helping both to prepare these changes and to condition the specific course they took in the West. Change number one, particularly associated with the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, involved a growing contention among Western philosophers that children were not corrupted at birth, as Christian and particularly Protestant doctrines of original sin suggested. Rather, as John Locke argued, children were blank slates at birth, open to learning and essentially good, or at least neutral, unless corrupted by outside influences. These ideas stimulated increasing arguments about the need to reserve childhood for education. They provoked intense debates about traditional religious emphases on sin and remedial discipline. Well into the mid-nineteenth century, United States Protestants contended between a sinful and an innocent view of early childhood, with the latter position gradually winning out without, however, obliterating a persistent traditionalist minority.17 17 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1838); Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977); Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (Hartford, CT, 1847).

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The second innovation, taking shape by the 1730s, involved an emphasis on the strong emotional ties that should unite a successful family: particularly parents and even more particularly mothers, with children. This is not to contend that family love was new, but the explicit emphasis was unprecedented. In a proper family, children should express active affection for their parents; siblings should love each other; and mothers should unite the family with their encompassing emotion. Pictures of respectable families began to feature more expressions of emotion and physical contact.18 These intellectual changes were associated with other developments, though cause and effect is not always easy to sort out. Naming practices began to change. Fewer rural families now waited to name a child until it had passed age two and was therefore likely to survive. Names were less likely to be reused after a child died, and there was more effort to find original rather than family or biblical names for children. All of this suggests some increase in the emotional investment in children and particularly a greater sense of the individuality (hence, the distinctive nameability) of each child.19 Discipline changed, or at least it began to be discussed in new ways. West Europeans began to abandon the practice of swaddling infants. Rather, adults began to believe that children should be free to move their limbs as part of healthy development, even though the result required more supervision from sibling, maid or parent. New criticisms began to be levied against the practice of sending children out to wetnurses; parents should take care of their own children and should guard against practices that so often jeopardized a child’s health, as wetnursing certainly could do. Family advice now discouraged excessive anger directed

18 Elisabeth Badinter, Mother Love: Myth and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1981); Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978). 19 Daniel Scott Smith, “Child-Naming Practices, Kinship Ties, and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 18 (1985): 541–66.

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against children; as innocents, children should be free from angry reprimand. Physical punishments were now often regarded as too harsh. And there was increasing effort to caution parents against filling their children with fears, as in traditional threats of omnipresent death or bogeymen. These various shifts were undoubtedly more rhetorical than real for many decades. American family manuals were still arguing against parental anger in the early twentieth century, a full hundred years after the initial advice was offered. But there were new ideas in the wind, and some parents unquestionably sought to alter the ways in which they regarded childhood and actually treated children.20 Furthermore, closely associated with new emphasis on educability, children in the wealthier classes began to be treated as consumers—not in the more contemporary sense of buying lots of things for themselves, but in the sense of having products especially tailored for their use. Educational dolls and other objects, and most particularly books explicitly written for children, were early signs of this shift from the later eighteenth century onward. These changes could lead to restrictions on children’s free play, with opportunities for more adult guidance and supervision, but they did follow from some of the newer ideas of the purpose of childhood.21 Finally, in terms of general shifts, the new sense of optimism about children and youth began to recast the larger social valuation of age categories in western Europe and the new United States. Whereas in 1750 most Americans who lied about their age claimed to be older than they were and chose dress, including powdered wigs for the elite, that exaggerated age; by 1850 the age-enhancing dress was abandoned in favor of praise for youth, 20 George Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wetnursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Valerie Fildes, Wetnursing, a History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Trumbach, Rise of the Egalitarian Family; Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 21 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

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and people who lied about their years now lied downward. Youth was not necessarily becoming more pleasant in fact, but it had an unprecedented cachet in principle.22 Conversions to the actual structures of modern childhood occurred rather gradually in the West despite the important cultural preparation. New attention to education developed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example in France, with particular emphasis on new secondary school facilities for training bureaucratic and technical elites.23 Ideas about mass education emerged more gradually; France, for instance, passed a law encouraging primary education in the early 1830s, but implementation was spotty. The northern states of the new United States moved more swiftly. There were fewer church-state complexities in the new nation, and fewer concerns about the potential inroads mass education might make on traditional social hierarchies. In addition, American leaders soon developed a commitment to education as a means of acculturating the growing numbers of immigrants. Many states, like Massachusetts, had extensive systems by the 1830s and were even beginning to make education mandatory. Development of regulations for child labor emerged in the same period amid great debate. Middle class opinion was divided, some arguing for the importance of protecting and educating children, others dependent on the cheap labor children provided. Workers were also divided, but as factories grew and children were less likely to be supervised by family members, traditional dependence on children’s earnings was leavened by a desire to regulate. Many Western nations passed laws during the first half of the nineteenth century, but real inspection and enforcement came a bit later.24 By the later nineteenth century, however, the employment of young children was declining, aided by new machinery that did away with some of children’s simpler 22 David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 23 Peter N. Stearns, Schools and Students in Industrial Society: Japan and the West, 1870–1940 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998). 24 Heywood, Childhood; Zelizer, Pricing; Neil Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

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tasks. Casual employment in jobs like newspaper hawking, and a good bit of street activity including minor crime, persisted for lower class children into the twentieth century. Rural changes came slowly also, though they did occur. While children continued to be expected to help with chores and often serious harvesting work well into the twentieth century in the West, peasant and farm families did decide that education made some sense, sometimes even before legal obligations. French peasants, for example, converting to more market agriculture in the 1860s, began to realize that having sons who were literate, capable of calculations, and perhaps imbued with some scientific training would be useful even in terms of the family economy.25 Commitment to education beyond early childhood came more slowly, particularly outside the middle classes. Around 1900 a minority of middle class children, and a full three-quarters of the working class, still did not attend high school in the United States.26 But trends toward staying in school into midteens at least developed widely and then after World War II began to expand increasingly into college attendance, first in the United States and then in western Europe and Canada. Youth, as well as childhood, was being redefined. Gender was also redefined through education, though again gradually. The initial spread of education found both state and family concentrating disproportionately on boys, whose schooling would do the most good for families (those of the parents and those, ultimately, of the boys themselves). However, girls were increasingly included even at the secondary level, though often with distinctive curricula and separate activities. By the early twentieth century, as white collar occupations opened to women, families often found that education was becoming particularly important for girls; in the United States by the 1920s, the per25 Weber,

Peasants. Joel Perlman, “Curriculum and Tracking in the Transformation of the American High School: Providence, R.I. 1880–1930,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 29–55; Charles R. Day, Schools and Work: Technical and Vocational Education in France since the Third Republic (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001); Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). 26

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centage of girls in high schools surpassed that of boys. (By the 1980s the same gender reversal hit college populations.) Reduction of the birth rate also occurred gradually, again led by a middle class eager to be able to afford education and property for its children, and followed by urban workers and then peasants. (But in the United States, farm families often adopted lower birth rates quite early in order to be able to provide property inheritance for the children born.) Reducing the birth rate was a radical move, and some historians have argued that both men and women could be confused by the decline in quantitative parenting, uncertain what this change said about their family commitments or even sexual prowess.27 The change was further complicated by the unreliability of birth control devices during the nineteenth century and by strong prejudices, and even legal barriers, against their use in a time of official sexual prudery.28 Many people limited the birth rates primarily through sexual abstinence. Here too, however, the basic trends took clear hold, and by the early twentieth century large families were unusual, particularly in the cities and among non-immigrant groups. The final piece of the modern puzzle, the reduction of the death rate, occurred more abruptly in the West. A sense of anguish and guilt over children who died preceded the big statistical shift that depended on new measures in public health and growing emphasis on sterilization among personnel involved in overseeing childbirth. Between 1880 and 1920, a genuine revolution occurred in infant mortality, driving rates down to a literally unprecedented 5 percent or below. By the 1920s, with this change still reverberating in further gains, the structure of modern childhood had been completed in the West. Adjustments to such radical changes took more time than this, of course. The drop in infant mortality was pure gain for most families, the only downside being the new levels of despair parents would encounter when, against all odds, a child did die. In the United States, few marriages could survive the death of a child by 27 Rudolph Binion, “Fiction as Social Fantasy: Europe’s Domestic Crisis of 1879-1914,” Journal of Social History 27 (1994): 679–99. 28 Seccombe, Weathering.

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the 1940s, a marked contrast to traditional reactions.29 Low birth rates were more contested, and indeed the return of prosperity after World War II ushered in an unexpected baby boom throughout Western society, showing that many people were not yet fully comfortable with one or two children alone. The end of the baby boom, by the 1970s, suggested a more definitive commitment to small families and even some new uncertainty about having any children at all, particularly in middle class families devoted to consumerism and leisure pursuits and in which both spouses were committed to careers.30 By the twenty-first century several societies no longer had birth rates high enough to sustain population. Schooling, finally, raised its own concerns. As the phenomenon became universal and as new components like grading were introduced in the early twentieth century, many parents demonstrated some uncertainty about the implications for their children and their control. In the United States a long campaign against homework followed parental belief that too much intellectual commitment was bad for kids, and the definition of acceptable levels of school pressure was still under discussion in the early twenty-first century. Far more important than these interesting symptoms of adjustment and hesitation in the West, however, was the spread of the modern model of childhood to other parts of the world. A number of regions made gestures toward the Western patterns by the later nineteenth century, constrained however by limited resources and the high proportion of rural inhabitants. Several Latin American countries strove to expand their school systems, and a middle class emerged that unquestionably began to associate childhood and even youth with education.31 The most dramatic early convert to modern childhood outside the West was of course Japan. Legislation in 1872 provided for universal primary education, revealingly for girls as well as boys, in one of the first reform measures of the Meiji era. It took two decades for educa29 Stearns,

American Cool. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). 31 Tobias Hecht, ed., Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 30

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tion to become truly universal, and longer than that for adolescents to be widely incorporated into schooling; while secondary training expanded for the middle and upper classes, early Japanese industry relied heavily on teenage labor, including female labor, because of its low cost. But the trend toward associating childhood with schooling advanced fairly steadily in the twentieth century, followed by increasing rates of attendance at postsecondary institutions; correspondingly, legislation progressively banned the labor of children and then youth. Infant mortality began to drop early in the reform era as well as a result of eager implementation of public health measures. The third leg of modern childhood, lower birth rates, came more gradually; full government commitment to low birth rates developed only after World War II, and Japan long relied more heavily on abortion than did most Western societies.32 As we have seen, Japan’s increasing conversion to the patterns of modern childhood went beyond the three central features, showing again the wide-ranging implications of the transition. The focus on schooling, as well as awareness of broader Western trends, prompted many reformers to envisage childhood as a separate stage of life far more clearly than had been traditionally the case. Children began to be seen in terms of their progressive learning capacity, requiring new attention to the relationship between education and cognitive development; and they began to be regarded as uniquely vulnerable. As early as 1874 Mitsukuri Shuhei remarked:33 From infancy until they are six or seven, children’s minds are clean and without slightest blemish while their characters are as pure and unadulterated as a perfect pearl. Since what then touches their eyes or ears, whether good or bad, makes a deep impression that will not be wiped

32 Ronald

Philip Dore and Reinhard Bendix, Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), esp. chapters 3 and 4. 33 Mitsukuri Shuhei, “On Education,” in Merioku Zasshi, Journal of Japanese Enlightment, trans. William Braisted (Tokyo, 1976), 106; see Platt, “Japanese Childhood.”

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out until death. This age provides the best opportunity for disciplining their natures and training them in deportment. They will become learned and virtuous if the training methods are appropriate, stupid and bigoted if the methods are bad. Adult, including parental, responsibilities were enormous under this vision—as an 1876 teacher’s manual proclaimed, “What determines whether habits or good behavior and diligence, or bad behavior and indolence will form are the standards and models provided by the conduct of parents and teachers.”34 These beliefs produced a growing commitment to childrearing manuals written by experts; parents’ traditions and instincts were inadequate. Special playgrounds and children’s activities were another consequence. And Japan quickly imitated the West in setting up distinct laws, court procedures, and punishments for juvenile as opposed to adult crime. A wide array of traditional conceptions had to be set aside as part of the basic transition to modern childhood. Japan did not, of course, fully Westernize its approach to children; a distinction between modernization and Westernization is vital. By the 1880s the government pulled back from any hint of full Westernization, insisting on duties of obedience and group cohesion in contrast to Western educational values.35 As part of the group-oriented approach, shaming remained much more important in Japanese childrearing and schooling than was true in the West. While some antidotes to Westernism, like the careful inculcation of loyalty to emperor and state, disappeared or declined after World War II, the emphasis on group allegiance persisted. Japan stood, and stands, as a key example of a full and successful modernization of childhood compatible with the retention of distinctive characteristics. The second great conversion to modern childhood outside the West, and the one affecting the largest portion of the global population, involved the commitments of Marxist revolutionaries, first 34 Aoki Sukekiyo, quoted in Mark Lincicome, Principles, Praxis, and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 37. 35 Stearns, Schools and Students.

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in Russia, then in China and elsewhere. For all their hostility to Western institutions and values, Russian revolutionaries did not question the idea that the desirable condition of childhood should be schooling. The Russian educational system had already been expanding in the later nineteenth century. The revolutionary regime worked hard and effectively to make education universal, as a precondition of industrial development and political uplift alike. And while child, particularly adolescent, labor surely persisted, especially in the countryside, parents increasingly adjusted to the idea that schooling was the normal condition of childhood; and a Marxist middle or bureaucratic class emerged bent on maximizing their children’s opportunities for school success. The regime also supported efforts to reduce child death rates, again with considerable success. Debates about birth rates ranged widely in the 1920s, with many groups of women pushing for restrictions. The Stalinist government returned to a more pronatal policy in the 1930s. But the demands of an industrial society, including the costs of schooling and the increasing limitations on work, pushed in the same directions in Russia as in the West, and birth rates dropped rapidly. As in Japan, reliance on abortion was considerable.36 China, following 1949, moved in similar directions. Despite tremendous exploitation of cheap labor, children were increasingly placed in school, at least until adolescence. The need to improve skills, as part of building a modern economy, and the opportunities for Marxist indoctrination were too great to pass up. The regime oscillated on birth rate policies under Mao Zedong but by the late 1970s publicly opted for a dramatic child limitation policy, fining families that produced more than one child.37 The policy had interesting consequences. Female infanticide probably increased as families pursued their traditional preference for boys amid restrictions on the number of children they could report. Certainly, girls outnumbered boys in Chinese Ansley Coale, Barbara Anderson, Ernie Harris, eds., Human Fertility in Russia since the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Daniel Hoffmann, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its PanEuropean Context,” Journal of Social History 34 (2000): 35–54. 37 James Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36

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orphanages by a margin of eight to one—here was a distinctive Chinese twist on the overall modern pattern. Other results were more in line with developments elsewhere: with few children per family, emotional attachment to individual children increased and indulgence of the child, including (resources permitting) showering it with gifts, increased as well. Again, the modernization of childhood was not a matter of formal laws and structures alone. The Marxist approach to children did highlight one feature that had been visible though less prominent in Western and Japanese approaches: a fervent dedication to the formation of youth groups. Communist youth organizations were designed to acknowledge the importance but also the separateness of youth, while furthering indoctrination and disciplining youthful energies beyond the demands of formal schooling.38 This celebratory but monitoring approach to youth had been foreshadowed by movements such as scouting, which developed in the West from the later nineteenth century onward. Youth groups were also prominent in the fascist approach to mobilizing youth. By the early twenty-first century, partly because of the decline of fascism and then communism, this organizational approach to youth had receded somewhat on a global basis, but it remains an interesting, recurrently significant outcropping. The Marxist commitment to schooling and improved health care would transform childhood not only in Russia and China, but also in eastern Europe, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. Changes launched or furthered by communism did not recede when and if communism itself began to fade. And of course many other countries, promoting education under the aegis of Arab nationalism, as in Egypt or Iraq, or some other modern mantle began to move in similar directions, if often with less dramatic speed. Rates of child labor declined steadily on a global basis during the final decades of the twentieth century, just as access to education expanded for both boys and girls, admittedly amid great regional variations. 38 Lisa Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001); David Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

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(And despite the variations there were some striking commonalities by 2003. Sixty percent of Iranian university students were women, about the same as in the U.S.) The same trends apply to improvements in children’s mortality rates and decreases in the birth rate: the global pattern shows overall movement toward the modernization model, though different regions are proceeding with quite different timings and speeds.39 By the late twentieth century, with hints earlier, this basic pattern of change was complemented and in some ways complicated by the implications of globalization for childhood—the results of the increasingly intricate interactions among literally all the major regions of the world. There were three aspects to this process, which operated coincidentally with the continued spread of modernization patterns and in one case (though the feeblest) directly supported the process. Point one involved the deployment of global standards concerning children, under the auspices of international agencies such as the International Labor Office (ILO) and various nongovernmental organizations including international children’s charities. As early as the 1920s, the ILO began to discuss conventions that would limit child labor worldwide, with the implicit understanding that this would make available time for school. After World War II, the ILO and a variety of United Nations agencies pushed the same agenda, urging the redefinition of childhood as a matter of basic right. Agencies also worked hard to reduce infant mortality, and by the 1990s the UN was sponsoring conferences on reduction of the birth rate (with a general agreement, despite some hesitancies from the Roman Catholic Church, Muslim nations, and the United States, that promotion of education for women was a key step in this direction).40 Organizations like UNESCO sponsored a variety of informational efforts, including advertisements, in places like the Middle East, urging parents to promote education and pay new kinds of attention to children as individuals. In other words, 39 Wolf Schaefer, “Global Patterns in Childhood,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): forthcoming. 40 United Nations, Report of the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994).

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the modernization of childhood, in all its key facets, became something of a global enterprise.41 There were, of course, limitations. Most obviously, many people, particularly in rural areas, were absolutely untouched by these efforts, and others resisted basic changes in the name of tradition. Still others were frankly torn—open to the idea that innovations of childrearing, along Western models, might promote the success of their children, but eager to retain parental controls and familial allegiances over more individualistic agendas.42 It is difficult to gauge how much impact the global campaigns had, though the continued reduction of child labor and of birth and death rates suggest some success. The second limitation involved some surprising hesitancies in the global movement itself. In 1973 the ILO proposed a new convention that would call for a ban on child labor under age sixteen. This was trumpeted as a logical extension of children’s rights. But the convention failed to attract sufficient international support: some countries, like the United States, feared this kind of international obligation and specifically sought to defend child labor, for example among migrant (and foreign) agricultural workers; other countries believed more generally that child labor remained vital to national and family economies. The full modern model of childhood, at least at the level of adolescence, was not yet ready for global subscription. At the end of the twentieth century the ILO pulled back to a more limited, though still important, effort to focus on abolishing the worst forms of child labor: sexual exploitation, enslavement for payment of family debts or other reasons, or military service. Most nations did sign this, though the United States held back as part of its general antipathy to any compromise of sovereignty. Globalism for children’s rights was a real force, supplemented by charitable efforts to promote health and education for Third World children, but it had some boundaries. 41 Peter N. Stearns, Global Outrage: The Origins and Evolution of World Opinion (London: OneWorld, forthcoming); Saud Joseph, “Childhood, Citizenship, and Globalization in Lebanon,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): forthcoming. 42 Saud Joseph, “Childhood, Citizenship, and Globalization in Lebanon”; Peter N. Stearns, “Conclusion: Change, Globalization and Childhood,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): forthcoming.

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The second impact of globalization on children was, frankly, perversely related to the larger project of modernization and indeed the new movement for children’s rights. Global economics provided new opportunities and new needs for reliance on child labor. The burgeoning multinationals employed relatively few children, only 5 percent of the total global child labor force at the outset of the twenty-first century. But competition from international manufacturing disrupted a number of traditional branches of production, leading to rising unemployment and poverty, which could in turn force families to push their children into work, including street activities like petty crime and, for girls, the sale of sex. By the 1990s, pressure from international agencies like the IMF to limit state expenditures in favor of free market economies also curtailed social payments to poor families, another spur to attempts to use children’s work. Child labor remained stubbornly persistent as a result in places like the cities of Brazil, where hordes of street children, tied to families though not regularly living at home because poverty prevented their care, tried a variety of work recourses in order to survive and, if possible, bring something back to their parents. And in one major region, South and Southeast Asia, the rate of child labor actually rose substantially against the larger global trends. Economic pressures combined with clearly traditional familial and social attitudes about child labor to maintain a distinct regional variant, challenging any idea of a full global commitment to the modern patterns of childhood.43 The third impact of globalization on childhood and youth involved the wave of global consumerism, in which children and particularly youth could actually take a leading role. As with modernization, the first steps in the new association of children with consumerism occurred in the West. By the later nineteenth century, children were beginning to buy items on their own—for example, the practice of giving allowances was taking hold in the United States; certain kinds of snacks and exciting reading 43 Elizabeth Kuznesof, “The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and Childhood in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): forthcoming; Jeremy Seabrook, Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market (London: Pluto Press, 2001).

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materials including westerns and detective stories for boys (soon to be joined by comics) became available, often to the dismay of parents who largely sought to counter by buying other kinds of consumer products for their kids. Commercial firms began to see children as a market; by the 1920s, radio programming aimed at children included alluring advertising based on, and furthering, this assumption.44 Certain kinds of Western products began to attract youth in other societies.45 Urban Lebanese teenagers began to attend Western movies fairly regularly by the 1920s and 1930s. But the full explosion of global consumerism for children awaited the later twentieth century, with its new technologies and market opportunities. There were a host of markers whose familiarity should not disguise their fundamental novelty and importance. Youth began to patronize fast food restaurants, often to the dismay of their parents which was, of course, one of the purposes of these new tastes. Television shows like Sesame Street, translated into most major languages, promoted new standards for children, and MTV and global rock tours offered youth a common musical language. Dress for urban young people began to standardize in many places, often against adult and traditional patterns. Patronage of theme parks provided new standards for parents to demonstrate their economic success and filial love in a single consumerist act: taking the kids to Orlando became a ritual for caring, successful Latin American parents. This was the context in which Disney figures and Barbie dolls became part of a global children’s play kit, and in which emblems like Britney Spears could achieve worldwide status. With some plausibility, certain observers began to contend that a global youth culture had come into being.46 44 Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and Consumer Society in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: forthcoming); Susan Matt, “Children’s Envy and the Emergence of the Modern Consumer Ethic,” Journal of Social History 36 (2002): 283–302; Zelizer, Pricing. 45 Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2001); Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (London: Routledge, 1998); John Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, rev. ed (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). 46 Skelton and Valentine, Cool Places.

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It is vital to recognize that this culture was not based entirely on Western sources. Japan and, to a lesser degree, some other countries became creative centers as well. Japan gained worldwide prominence in promoting cute images and products for young children, based on but also spurring a new conception of infancy: the craze for the Hello Kitty series was one manifestation. Japan also began to take the lead in various styles and products for “youth cool,” and cool exports topped Japan’s list, in terms of earnings, by 2003. Wired magazine began to feature products adopted by young Japanese women as harbingers of global trends.47 From global consumerism, youth and, to a lesser extent, children in many regions gained a sense of separate identity and belonging. A young man in Hong Kong, asked why he patronized McDonald’s, noted that he actually didn’t like the food much, but he gloried in seeing and being seen.48 Clearly, new styles gave young people an alternative to accepting full parental control; consumerism in this sense could be a real weapon in a power struggle. Children often had an unprecedented edge in leading larger societies, including adult family members, toward greater consumer familiarity and competence, a dramatic new role. At the same time, consumerism also affected adult responsibilities. At some point in the twentieth century, parents in most places began to believe that providing goods and enjoyment to their children was a vital part of their role and began to experience real guilt when their capacity was inadequate. The American jingle “Happy Birthday” was translated and adopted in virtually all major language areas, a fascinating case of global transformation to a new model of parental identification for individual children. In many ways, of course, consumerism could mesh with the larger modernization agenda. Allowing children to receive individual gifts, for example at the spreading craze for birthday parties, or to make purchases could be a counterpart of promoting individual identities and achievements through schooling. Most 47 Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 48 Stearns, Consumerism, 90–91.

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obviously, consumerism became the new reward for the willingness to accept schooling in the first place. Consumerism also built on the peer group and age-graded features of modern childhood. On the other hand, childhood consumerism had unique qualities that had not been part of the modernization model, and it could even conflict with aspects of the model when youth, for example, adopted consumerist interests in preference to school diligence or even further attendance—a clash that could be noted in individual cases from the United States to Madagascar.49 Globalization, then, added features, complexities, and some new regional divisions to what was already a fundamental pattern of alteration in childhood. The process is ongoing, and it clearly would be premature to view changing childhood as a closed historical case. It is not even definite that the modernization model, with its supportive global trappings, will be everywhere triumphant: child labor is an obvious variable related to the larger issue of vastly different resource levels; different traditions concerning childhood—including gender and sexuality—prompt important resistance to aspects of modernization and certainly to the implications of consumerism and certain aspects of global rights. We already know from the Japanese example and others that even where common patterns of change do prevail, they will be combined with important regional variants—it is vital to avoid a falsely homogeneous picture. Another common historical finding is essential as well, though terribly hard to assimilate given the culture of progress in which we operate: the changes in the nature of childhood have been far from uniformly benign. It is, of course, hard to imagine going back to a situation in which many children died before adulthood and in which harsh physical labor and, often, abusive discipline went unchecked. But modern childhood has not eliminated material distress and abuse. In many regions, children figure less prominently in policy concerns than they did in the past, in part a result of changing age structures that limit children’s numbers and promote the elderly. And modern childhood brings its own concerns about meaning and identity, leading almost certainly to 49 Cole,

“Jaombilo.”

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more mental illness and suicide among young people than occurred in more traditional settings. One of the reasons, in fact, for serious awareness of the modern history of childhood is to highlight problems resulting from changes that call out for new kinds of imaginative attention. Too often, if childhood is not simply omitted from historical coverage altogether, it is sugarcoated with unwarranted assumptions about progress, as if good intentions and warm rhetoric can adequately describe what has been, and remains, a complex historical process. At some points, of course, youth themselves seemed to protest aspects of their modern condition. Youth emerged as a protest category in the West in the late nineteenth century, and engaged with campaigns on the political right as well as the left. Student groups have played a significant role in modern protest on many occasions.50 A Western-wide youth movement developed in the 1960s, with targets including consumerism and some of the uncertainties and hierarchies involved in higher education. The role of youth in contemporary protest, including Muslim protest, has often been noted. But a durable global youth protest surge has not developed. The 1960s movement ended fairly definitively in 1973, and in many Western nations youth political activity declined precipitously and damagingly. The lures of consumerism and the focus on educational achievement, plus ongoing cultural divisions, seem to limit youth’s ability to react collectively to some of the downsides of change. Here’s another invitation to renewed social and policy attention to this key category of the global experience.

50 Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1971).

About the Author PETER STEARNS received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Editor of the Journal of Social History, he is also a prolific author, having recently published The Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America; Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in Western Society; Gender in World History; and World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity. Dr. Stearns also is editor of the recently published six-volume Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000. He is active in several professional organizations including the American Historical Society, the Society of French Historical Studies, the Social Science History Association, and the International Society for Research on Emotion. He is currently provost at George Mason University, bringing to that position nearly 40 years of professional experience in higher education, both as a teacher and an administrator.

Previous Charles Edmondson Historical Lecturers *Paul K. Conkin, University of Wisconsin, 1977–1978: “American Christianity in Crisis: Religious Rationalism and Darwinism.” *Walter LaFeber, Cornell University, 1979–1980: “The Third Cold War: Kissinger Years and Carter Years.” *Martin E. Marty, University of Chicago, 1980–1981: “Religious Crises in Modern America: Modernism and Fundamentalism.” **William H. McNeill, University of Chicago, 1981–1982: “The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times.” Robert L. Heilbroner, The New School for Social Research, 1982–1983: “Capitalism in Transition: The Twentieth Century.” C. Vann Woodward, Yale University, emeritus, 1983–1984: “Continuing Themes in Southern History: The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 1954–1984; and The Burden of Southern History, 1952–1984” *William E. Leuchtenburg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1984–1985: “The 1984 Presidential Election in Historical Perspective: From Civil War to the New Deal; From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.” Peter Gay, Yale University, 1985–1986: “Aggression: Toward a Theory of Aggression,” and “Humor: Aggression at Work.” *Gordon S. Wood, Brown University, 1986–1987: The Making of the Constitution.” Gerder Lerner, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1987–1988: “Sex and Class: A Revisionist Perspective.” *Robert Darnton, Princeton University, 1988–1989: “The French Revolution at Street Level” and “From Enlightenment to Revolution.” *Stephen B. Oates, University of Massachusetts, 1989–1990: “Biography: The Heart of History” and “How the Trumpet Came to Sound: The Process and Perils of Writing a Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.” *Dan T. Carter, Emory University 1990–1991: “George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and the Transformation of American Politics.” *Geoffrey A. Hosking, University of London, 1991–1992: “Empire and Nation in Russian History.” *Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University, 1992–1993: “Soul Murder and Slavery.”

*Philip D. Curtin, Johns Hopkins University, 1993–1994: “Why People Move: Migration in African History.” *Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University, 1994–1995: “Race, Class, and Ethnicity in Latin American and the Caribbean.” *Jonathan D. Spence, Yale University, 1995–1996: “The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836–1864.” *David N. Cannadine, Columbia University, 1996–1997: “Britain in Decline?” *Alan Brinkley, Columbia University, 1997–1998: “Culture and Politics in the Great Depression.” Leon F. Litwack, University of California, Berkeley, 1998–1999: “Wade in the Water: African Americans and Race Relations.” *Geoffrey Parker, Ohio State University, 1999–2000: “The World is Not Enough: The Imperial Vision of Philip II of Spain.” Linda Kerber, University of Iowa, 2000–2001: “Gender and Inequality.” *Yvonne Haddad, Georgetown University, 2001–2002: “Not Quite Americans? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States.” Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002–2003: “Imagining Life in the Americas.” *David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University, 2003–2004: “Spanish Bourbons and Wild Indians.” *Peter N. Stearns, George Mason University, 2004–2005: “Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context” *Printed copies are available from Baylor University Press **Printed copies are available from Princeton University Press