Childhood and Child Rearing - The Child-centered Modern Age, The Historicity Of Childhood, Mother And Child: The First Dyad
children world
During the last two centuries, even amid poverty and war, more children have had the opportunity for successful lives than ever before. The modern concern for child health, education, and well-being, however, emerged only after long millennia in which children's welfare was subordinated to the needs and goals of caretakers and communities—a pattern also encountered today in developing regions of the world. In recent decades, scholars have gained considerable understanding of the experience of children, as well as attitudes toward childhood in the premodern world.
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Since the nineteenth century, scholars, scientists, and writers, along with lawyers, statesmen, and philanthropists, have concerned themselves with the nature and welfare of the child as at no previous time. Triggering that interest were the ideas of John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and later authors of the Romantic movement. Elaborated in his Essay on Human…
Centuries of Childhood presents the thesis that the "concept of childhood" itself is modern: a creation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This thesis has been disputed and defended by later scholars. As a product of that controversy, the historicity of childhood has been established indisputably. The concept of childhood, along with childhood itself, is subject to change i…
Women alone give birth to children, although in the simplest band-level societies, child rearing is a more collective enterprise than among later agriculturalists, and even among agricultural peoples, social structures such as kin groups (clans and lineages) and polygynous marriages often lead to families in which children acknowledge multiple adults who raise them, and adults correspondingly reco…
In premodern times, a child's chances of survival depended on her mother's availability to nurture; but so, too, on her father's benevolence. For once human beings joined together in sedentary communities to engage in agricultural production, the father-headed household made an appearance. Fathers were the gatekeepers of households, and the guardians of the children he admitte…
Maternal rearing lasted until the age of seven, approximately, in most societies. Thereafter, although some girls continued under their mothers' care until marriage, most children learned the tasks of adulthood elsewhere: from tutors, at work, in school, or by apprenticeship. Almost universally, the age of seven (sometimes six or eight) is the point at which children were thought to reach a…
The twin processes of Enlightenment and industrialization mark the division between premodern and modern for childhood and concepts of childhood. Whereas the Enlightenment introduced the ideas with which this article began, leading to the modern disciplines that specialize in the condition and care of the child, industrialization introduced new forms of exploitation of children, but also, in time,…
Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage, 1962. Atkinson, Clarissa W. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Bergmann, Martin S. In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. New York: Columbia Universit…
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