Chapter 4
Building Order: Culture and History
Childhood as a Social Construction
Childhood is such a
universal feature of human life that we readily consider it a natural stage of
development. After all, doesn't every society that's ever existed have some people
identified as "children"?
As obvious as the answer
to this question may seem, variations in culture and over time are dramatic. People in
modern Western societies have a widely held, unquestioned belief that children are
fundamentally different from adults. We take for granted that children areóand have
always beenóinnocent and entitled to nurturing and protection. However, in other cultures
(for example, Japan) children are viewed as much more independent creatures who can act
willfully from the earliest moments of life.1
We tend to base our
Western beliefs about the nature of childhood on biological considerations. Young children
are thoroughly dependent on adults for their survival. Infants cannot feed themselves or
take care of themselves in any way. A 10-month-old child, left on its own, will surely die
within days. A human may remain dependent on his or her parents for several decades.
By contrast, other animal
babies are much more self-sufficient. A newborn horse, for example, is able to gallop
around when it is only a few minutes old.
To us, then, laws
protecting innocent and defenseless children from dangers like exploitation at work,
pornography, neglect, and abuse make sense. It seems inconceivable to us that the
protection of innocent children is not a fundamental value in all societies, present and
past.
But as you will see,
childhood is not simply a biological stage of development. Rather it is a social category
that emerges from the attitudes, beliefs, and values of particular societies at particular
points in time,2 subject to changing definitions and
expectations. Parental attachment to children, therefore, is less a function of instinct
than a function of how parents in a particular culture or historical era perceive their
responsibilities toward their children.
Indeed, according to some
historians, the notion of childhood as a distinct phase of life didn't develop in Western
culture until the 16th and 17th centuries.3
Views of Childhood
in the Middle Ages
Until the end of the
Middle Ages, children in the West were sometimes seen as miniature versions of adults. If
you look at paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries, you will notice that the children
depicted in family portraits look like shrunken replicas of their parents. Their clothes
and their bodily proportions are the same as those of adults.
This image goes beyond
artistic representation. Because they were seen as miniature adults, children of the era
were expected to act accordingly. They were expected to participate in all aspects of
social life alongside their parents. Foul language, sexual acts, death, and so on were all
permitted in their presence.
The notion that children
deserve special protection and treatment did not exist at this time. Children could be
punished, and frequently were, for social transgressions with the same severity that
adults were.
Families of the 1600s and
1700s may have valued children for their role in inheritance, but children clearly didn't
elicit the same kind of sentiment that they elicit from adults today.4
This rather
"unsentimental" treatment of children probably had something to do with
demographic realities. Fatal disease in the Middle Ages was quite prevalent, and infant
mortality rates were extremely high. Young children were not expected to live for very
long. In 17th century France, for instance, between 20 and 50 percent of all infants died
within the first year after birth.5
People commonly believed,
therefore, that if they wanted only a few children, they should have many more in order to
"hedge their bets.Ó Parents couldn't allow themselves to get too emotionally
attached to something that was seen as a probable loss. Some even referred to their infant
as "it" until the child reached an age at which survival was likely.
At that time, the death of
a baby was probably not the emotional tragedy that it is today. In Spain, for example,
when an infant died he or she was likely to be buried almost anywhere on the premises,
like a pet cat or dog. Even the dead children of the rich were sometimes treated as
paupers, their bodies sewn into sacks and thrown into common graves.6
Childhood in the
18th and 19th Centuries
By the 18th century,
perceptions of childhood in the West were beginning to change. Children began to be seen
as innocent and in need of protection, not unlike the way we see them today. Consequently,
though, they were viewed as weak and susceptible to temptation. Along with the notion of
protection came the notion of discipline, as parents taught their children to avoid the
enticements of their social world.
Severe beatings of
children in the name of discipline were common occurrences up until the late 18th century
(and persist in some corners of society even to this day). Such cruelty was often couched
in religious terms. One Dutch theologian offered the theory that God had formed the human
buttocks so that they could be severely beaten without causing serious bodily injury.7 Heaven was sometimes described to children in Sunday school as
"a place where children are never beaten."8
Definitions of childhood
throughout history have been influenced by social institutions as well. Until the late
1800s, for instance, child labor was commonly practiced and accepted.9
In the early part of the 19th century, perhaps half of all workers in northern factories
were children under the age of eleven.10 Children worked
as long and as hard as adults, sometimes even harder. Because of their small size, they
were sometimes given difficult and hazardous jobs, like cleaning out the insides of narrow
factory chimneys. In poor urban families, parents often forced their children to engage in
scavenging and street peddling.
In addition, abandoned
children were sometimes recruited by unscrupulous adults for use in robbery and
prostitution and other marginal enterprises:
Some had their teeth torn
out to serve as artificial teeth for the rich; others were deliberately maimed by beggars
to arouse compassion. . . . Even this latter crime was one upon which the law looked with
a remarkably tolerant eye. In 1761 a beggar woman, convicted of deliberately "putting
out the eyes of children with whom she went about the country" in order to attract
pity and alms, was sentenced to no more than two years' imprisonment.11
Although we have little
evidence today of complete social approval or tolerance of these kinds of practices, they
weren't severely sanctioned either.
Only by the middle of the
19th century did the first child protection organizations emerge. In 1825 the first House
of Refuge in America was founded, an institution whose purpose was to provide sanctuary to
children who had been abused or neglected. In subsequent years many similar institutions
were established.
Even these, however, were
not totally sensitive to the welfare of children. Their purpose was not to protect but to
prevent children from becoming economic burdens and threats to society. Many people at the
time believed that a bad childhood would lead to a bad adulthood. The House of Refuge
sought to prevent the potential criminal tendencies of poor urban youths from ever
surfacing by removing them from abusive home environments and placing them in
institutions. Here they would share a "proper growing up" with other abandoned
and neglected youths as well as delinquents who had violated the law.12
The social value of
children was also affected by major economic transformations in society.13 The shift from a predominantly agricultural economy to an
industrialized one in the 19th century revolutionized cultural conceptions. On the farm,
families were bound together by economic necessity rather than emotions. Children were a
crucial source of labor in the family economy, and they were a source of financial support
in old age.14
Consequently, the birth of
a child was hailed as the arrival of a future laborer who would contribute to the
financial security of the family. In adoption practices, the most desirable child was the
teenage male because of his potential value as a laborer.15
20th-Century
Childhood
With the firm
establishment of industrialization by the middle of the 20th century, children were no
longer seen as economic necessities. The main source of income was now the parents, or
more accurately the fathers, working outside the home. As a result, children became
economically "useless," and people began to see them as downright costly to
raise.16
At the same time, though,
the culture was beginning to recognize their emotional importance. Today's parents are
more likely to look to their children for intimacy and less likely to expect anything
tangible in return, such as economic support in old age.
The contemporary social
value of children is therefore determined not by their labor potential but by the love and
care they are thought to deserve. Hence the most desirable child for adoption today is the
newborn baby. A person living in an earlier era would find this preference difficult to
understand, just as we today assume that babies bring forth a nurturing instinct in
adults.
1Kagan, J. 1976. Raising children in modern America:
Problems and prospective solutions. Boston: Little, Brown.
2Hays, S. 1996. The cultural contradictions of motherhood.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
3Aries, P. 1962. Centuries of childhood: A social history of
family life. New York: Vintage Books.
4Aries, P. 1962. Centuries of childhood: A social history of
family life. New York: Vintage Books.
5McCoy, E. 1981. "Childhood through the ages."
Parents Magazine, January.
6Cited in Zelizer, V. 1985. Pricing the priceless child. New
York: Basic Books.
7Stone, L. 1979. The family, sex and marriage in England
1500-1800. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
8Archer, D. 1985. "Social deviance." In G. Lindzey
& E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (3rd ed., Vol. 2). New York: Random
House.
9Archer, D. 1985. "Social deviance." In G. Lindzey
& E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (3rd ed., Vol. 2). New York: Random
House.
10Coontz, S. 1992. The way we never were. New York: Basic
Books.
11Stone, L. 1979. The family, sex and marriage in England
1500-1800. New York: Harper Torchbooks. p. 298.
12Pfohl, S. J. 1977. "The discovery of child
abuse." Social Problems, 24, 310-323.
13LeVine, R. A., & White, M. 1992. "The social
transformation of childhood." In A. S. Skolnick & J. H. Skolnick (Eds.), Family
in transition. New York: HarperCollins. Also Zelizer, V. 1985. Pricing the priceless
child. New York: Basic Books.
14LeVine, R. A., & White, M. 1992. "The social
transformation of childhood." In A. S. Skolnick & J. H. Skolnick (Eds.), Family
in transition. New York: HarperCollins.
15Zelizer, V. 1985. Pricing the priceless child. New York:
Basic Books.
16LeVine, R. A., & White, M. 1992. "The social
transformation of childhood." In A. S. Skolnick & J. H. Skolnick (Eds.), Family
in transition. New York: HarperCollins.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created October 7, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
http://www.pineforge.com/newman. |