About 150 years ago, after a short infancy (infant meaning 'without speech'), working-class children were very much treated as adults. They had few rights or possessions, heavy workloads, little leisure, and the anxieties and hardships of poverty. Childhood has since gradually been subdivided into babies, toddlers, pre-schoolers and so on, including adolescents.
Childhood is a set of ideas about what children are and ought to be like, and how they should behave and relate to adults. Children are so confined today that it is often assumed that they cannot - and should not - take an active part in their communities. Less than a century ago their lives were far more closely woven in 'adult' society, and still are today in the poorer majority world. Children aged four or five would go alone on errands across a busy city, use public transport, shop and barter, or ramble in the countryside. Today, millions of young children help their parents by working in homes, farms and streets. In Britain today, thousands of children aged from three upwards help to care for a sick or disabled relative.
The point here is not whether this should happen, but that it does happen and it shows young children's strengths and competencies. Perhaps children are happier today, with more toys, books, clothes, comfortable homes, food, education and care services planned for them. Certainly they are lonelier, with so many fewer children per family and per street, and are far more confined.
(Taken from Institutional rights and rites: A century of childhood, costing 5 from the Institute of Education bookshop on 020 7612 6050) Fashions in childcare swing from harsh to indulgent, from fairly loose to tight control. Today, alongside indulgence, children are often controlled more rigidly than ever before.
Adulthood is assumed to mean being strong and informed, reliable and wise, and childhood means being vulnerable and ignorant, unreliable and foolish.
Schools are planned on this assumption and constantly reinforce it. A curriculum is 'delivered' to children, as letters are posted into letterboxes, until children turn into adults. These institutionalised 'laws and customs' seem to obvious and natural to be worth noting, but are they true?
