Childhood doesn’t sound like it needs discovering, right? Surely everyone, up to and including a large number of animal species, are aware of children. But the historical record does not really agree with you on that.

Last week I had a small, but doable number of sources on childbirth, but ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors wrote next to nothing about what happens after that. Historian Margaret King calls ages zero to seven “the silent years” because we have so little information, and the ages seven to fourteen are not much less obscure (King, 389). Ancient biographies tend to start at adulthood. Apparently nothing interesting happened before that, even to very interesting people.

Certainly no contemporary historian during those periods even so much as glanced at children, except maybe to mention whether there was or was not an heir to the throne. Other than that, children were literally beneath our notice.

The amateur historian who changed all that was Philippe Ariès, who in 1962 published L’Enfant et la vie familial sous l’ancien régime, which was translated into English as Centuries of Childhood even though that is a completely terrible translation. With this book, Ariès single-handedly invented the discipline of child and family social history. Professional historians have been arguing for or against Ariès’s claims ever since. Actually, scratch that. They’ve just been arguing against him. Over and over and over. Sort of tells you something when they can’t stop talking about him.

Ariès biggest claim was that childhood as we know it is not an essential condition of humanity but is a social construct. People may have been young, small, and inexperienced in the past, but that didn’t make it in any way special or sentimental. Childhood was not a time of unique needs and importance to be cherished. Children weren’t treated differently to people who happened to be a different age. Children didn’t need particular clothes, games, laws, stories, education, and they certainly didn’t get excused from gainful employment. Very few of them felt the need to commemorate their age with exact birth dates or ages because it didn’t matter. What mattered was how much contribution you make to society, and since smaller, less-experienced people typically make less of a contribution, their efforts were generally not worth writing down. Hence their absence from the record.

Ariès supported this argument in a variety of ways, but the most obvious is in art. Medieval art rarely portrayed children, at least not in any way that is we can indisputably point to as, yes, that is definitely a child. All those Baby Jesus’s and later the Baby Mary’s look distinctly strange because we know they are supposed to be infants, but no infant ever had body proportions like that. They are truly miniature adults.

There are some examples of children in ancient art, but again, not all that many.

Ariès even claimed that parents in the past did not emotionally bond with their young children because it was not in their best interest to do so. Infant and child mortality was high. Appallingly high, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50 percent. You did not expect all your children to reach adulthood. It was self-defense not to form too deep a relationship with a child who might die of a thousand things just today, much less tomorrow. And to prove this, just look at the exceedingly common practice of upper- and middle-class families sending their babies out to poverty-stricken wet nurses for the early years of their lives, often visiting only once or twice or not at all. How emotionally invested can you be in a small child you never see?

How poverty-stricken women dealt with their own babies is one of the many, many questions that the records do not really answer, at least not to the level of detail that we would like. It is clear that some enslaved women were forced to limit their own babies’ milk in order to nurse an owner’s baby. It is not clear how many unenslaved women did exactly the same thing because economic necessity is also a harsh taskmaster.

In addition to the entirely normal practice of sending your children away for years at a time, Ariès could also point to countless callous remarks made across centuries. For example, he quotes the French writer Montaigne, who said that “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow” (quoted in Ariès, 39). Apparently, Montaigne cared so little, he couldn’t even remember exactly how many times this had happened. It has been up to historians pouring through the demographic records to say that in fact, he lost five of his six daughters. None of those five lived beyond three months, and two of them weren’t even named (Wood, 437).

According to Ariès, our modern concept of childhood showed the first faint glimmer in Renaissance Italy. It crystallized in 17th century England, gained momentum in 18th century France, got commercialized in the 19^th century, and finally spread through the urbanized areas of Europe, the Americas, and beyond, thanks to colonization and globalization and the growing expectation that your children would actually live long enough to deliver a return on your investment.

Ariès founded the field with these points, and every single one of them has been hotly contested by his successors. Lloyd deMause was the founder of psychohistory, a devotee of Freud, and he says that Ariès  is all kinds of wrong. Ancient and medieval people had a very specific concept of childhood, he says, and the concept was that of easy victim. No other demographic is so easily exploitable, and exploit they did. The experience of childhood was one of murder, abandonment, terror, and universal abuse. Parents not only didn’t mourn their children, they often materially assisted with the demise. On purpose. I am not exaggerating deMause’s view here. His opening sentence is “the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken” (deMause, 1).

Naturally deMause can find lots of references to incidents in the past that would absolutely get your children removed from your custody if Child Protective Services found you doing them today. But deMause is really over the top with his bleak views of humanity and our subconscious impulses. I personally gave up on his book when he started explaining what my own motherly subconscious is like. I realize the whole essence of a subconscious is that you are not consciously aware of what is in there, but if mine’s got as much garbage as deMause claims, then life really isn’t worth living anyway, so there’s no reason to spend it reading his book.

I’d like to give parents of the past at least a smidgen of credit, so I am much more interested in the positive critiques of Ariès. These historians unearth games and toys and laws that prove people did know about childhood and did treat it differently than adulthood. According to them, what changed in later centuries was the survival of the evidence, not the existence of the evidence (Orme, 9).

Of all Ariès’s claims, the one that comes under heaviest fire is the one about parents not caring about their children because of high mortality rates. This one has been attacked from all sides. There are biologists who say, of course parents cared. Our species is 100% dependent on parents caring because babies are so helpless and demanding. If parents didn’t care, we wouldn’t have survived long enough to have this argument (Hassett).

Then there are the more literary types, who point to the very real expressions of parental grief in the record. For example, at roughly the same time that Geoffrey Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, a fellow poet named Anonymous wrote an elegy for a daughter who died at the age of two.

Anonymous refers to the daughter as Pearl. Here’s a quote:

I clasped my hands, wholly overcome by the coldness of sorrow. A desolating grief had gripped my heart when reason could have put my mind at rest. . . Though the nature of Christ offered me comfort, my wretched desire writhed in despair. Among those flowers I fell to the floor, my senses suddenly swamped by scent, and sank into heavy sleep on the ground where my pearl was lost, on the same spot.

translated by Simon Armitage in Pearl : a new verse translation, 2017, p. 5)

It sure sounds like this is a parent who cared, and this is not the only example. Late Medieval Muslim writers in particular, had a whole genre of literature called consolation writings, which explained how bereaved parents should manage their grief. Stoically is the answer, which might seem like lack of affection, but the fact that so many writers needed to give this advice suggests that many parents did not feel stoic at all. They cared (Giladi).

With such evidence, many historians have roundly rejected Ariès’s claims from top to bottom. Even Ariès’s examples of parental indifference like Montaigne’s are misinterpreted, these historians claim, and when translated and contextualized correctly, they don’t say what he says they say. This is the contrary argument, made even by people who continue to recommend his work as the foundational text for the whole study of childhood.

I myself have more sympathy for Ariès and his points. If he overinterpreted some of his evidence, then the same can be said for his detractors. They are often arguing as if emotional attachment is a binary game: you either care or you don’t. But that doesn’t match any relationship I’ve ever been in or witnessed. Emotional attachment is actually a matter of degree. For example, the parenting advice that was current when my daughter was born had oodles to say about the vital importance of immediate skin-to-skin contact for emotional bonding. The underlying message was that if you don’t succeed in following the program laid out by today’s current best-selling author, your emotional bond with your child will be lessened. Presumably, the ancient and medieval mothers who never read a best-selling parenting book made their decisions based on a whole different set of trendy, panic-inducing advice.

Despite all the naysayers, there are at least two pieces of Ariès’s theory that seem indisputable. The first is that children are universal, but childhood is a social construct. What we expect for children and from children varies from time to time and place to place. We have not always thought of them in the same way we do now, even though that is not the same as saying that we didn’t think of them at all.

The second is that something started changing in Europe beginning in the Renaissance and gathering steam in later centuries. We do start to see more portraits of children, some of them painted by women I covered in the last season, all of them looking like they were painted by someone who had actually seen a child before.

There is also an increased interest in individuals, which will naturally extend downward to individuals who happen to not be very old. Education was increasingly valued, especially after the Protestant Reformation and though the goal was to produce literate adults, that is obviously best accomplished during childhood, so we can start the never-ending arguments on exactly how to educate children.

In England, philosopher John Locke wrote a widely read treatise on children and education. He did so out of his vast experience of having zero children himself. (This, by the way, is a trend in parenting advice. Those who have raised the fewest children are often the most sure that they know how it should be done.) I will talk more about John Locke in a later episode on education, but today I have more to say about his French successor Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In 1762 Rousseau published an even more widely read treatise on children. Unlike Locke, Rousseau actually had kids. But his book still isn’t based on any actual experience because he explains very clearly in a different book that he abandoned his kids at an orphanage on the theory that it would be better than taking the trouble to educate them. The absurdity of taking child-rearing advice from such a father was pointed out even at the time, but that did not stop his ideas from percolating. Rousseau was a big fan of natural childhood. His opening sentence is “Everything is good when it leaves the hands of God. Everything degenerates in the hands of men” (Rousseau, 6, translation my own).

This is the absolute flip of the older Christian idea that babies are born just dripping in original sin. But never fear, the sins will soon follow. Rousseau goes on to castigate the practice of swaddling infants, which had been done for millennia. Rousseau says it causes physical deformity: children should be allowed to move. He then urges mothers to nurse their own babies, and by “urges” I mean verbally flagellates the mothers who don’t. The La Leche League has nothing on Rousseau. He also targets the poverty-stricken wet nurses who did commonly do the nursing. He actually refers to their treatment of babies in their care as crucifixion (Rousseau, 14). Tact was really not his strongpoint.

Rousseau’s ideas went viral throughout Western Europe and into North America. At the same time, improvements in medicine increased the chance that a child would survive. Mortality was still high, of course, but the smallpox vaccine alone was huge, and it came in in the late 1700s.

The concept of childhood raced on into the 19th century. Motherhood was exalted as a profession in and of itself because children were that important. Some might even say tyrannically important. Educational opportunities expanded. Even for girls. Businessmen realized how easy it was to part parents from their money with children’s clothes, children’s books, children’s toys, children’s furniture, children’s food, whole industries which had never existed before, at least not on a mass scale.

And there was increased concern about orphans. Orphans had always been a subject of concern, but prior to the 19th century the question was how to prevent them from draining the resources of the government and community. The needs of society were paramount. Only in the 19th century did people begin to talk about the needs of those children, and how they deserve community help, even if it is a drain on society (Marten, 37). Think Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist here. This was a new way to think about orphans.

As you can imagine, this new-found child-centered focus was very unevenly applied. Millions of children were still working in the fields or the factories that supplied the wants of homes where people had time to sit around and read Rousseau and Dickens. But at least some of the readers were gradually picking up on the contradiction. Reform movements were underway.

On September 26, 1924, the League of Nations adopted a resolution declaring that children have rights. It was brief and not very specific, but it was a new thing in the world for a government entity to protect and think about childhood in that way. The number of child welfare groups exploded. Their efforts, again, have had mixed results.

The most dramatic victories are in the field of public health. Vaccines, sanitation, and improved nutrition have dropped childhood mortality rates below the wildest dreams of our ancestors. The UN estimates for worldwide mortality in 2021 were 3.8 percent for kids from zero to five, a far cry from the 20-50 percent range I mentioned before. Even the country with the very worst rate (Niger) came in at 11.5 percent in 2021. In other words, no one is doing their family planning on the expectation that half of their kids won’t make it to adulthood.

We also have a vastly higher percentage of children in school, especially girls, and vastly fewer children in workplaces. Admittedly, in every area of improvement there are troubling discrepancies based on your social class, ethnicity, and geographical area.

Also on the downside, the 20th century saw children victimized by war on a scale never seen before, or at least never documented before. The Nazis believed in nurturing healthy Aryan children, but they slaughtered about 1.5 million Jewish, disabled, and otherwise undesirable children (Marten, 88), and that is only the best publicized of the atrocities against children. The Khmer Rouge killed and abducted millions of children in Cambodia. Rwanda, Vietnam, Bosnia-Herzegovina, not to mention China and the Soviet Union, all have a long list of children who died or suffered for political or military reasons in the 20^th century and the list goes on. There are plenty more, including some in my own country.

But the very fact that someone is taking the trouble to count these abuses and publish the results, I personally think is a support of Ariès’s original point. We do think about childhood differently now. The death of a child was always tragic. I’m not saying parents in the past didn’t care. But now it is tragic and often so unnecessary. Unlike our ancestors, we know how to get the vast majority of our children to adulthood. So when we fail to do so, grief may not be the only emotion we feel.

For the purposes of this series on the history of girlhood, all of this background is important because the sources themselves limit what can be said. Whether because parents didn’t care or because the evidence didn’t survive, we just don’t know that much about children until about the 18^th century. Some, but not a lot. Especially for poor children, which was most of them. Especially for girls, which was roughly half of them. As usual, I will be bringing in older and non-Western sources as I can, but my ability to do so will be even more hampered than in previous series, and nowhere more so than next week when I talk about the words we Anglophone parents tell to our children with the history of Mother Goose and fairy tales.

Selected Sources

Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood : A Social History of Family Life. London, J. Cape, 1973.

Armitage, Simon. Pearl : A New Verse Translation. New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division Of W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Demause, Lloyd. The History of Childhood. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1974.

Giladi, Avner. “Islamic Consolation Treatises for Bereaved Parents: Some Bibliographical Notes.” Studia Islamica, no. 81 (1995): 197–202. https://doi.org/10.2307/1596026.

Hassett, Brenna. Growing up Human. Bloomsbury Publishing, 30 June 2022.

King, Margaret L. “Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go.” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2007): 371–407. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.2007.0147.

Marten, James. The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2 Aug. 2018.

Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, Ou de L’éducation. 1777, philo-labo.fr/fichiers/Rousseau%20-%20Emile%20(Grenoble).pdf. Accessed 22 Aug. 2023.

Ulanowicz, Anastasia. “Theorists: Philippe Ariès.” Www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu, http://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/aries.htm.

Woods, Robert. “Did Montaigne Love His Children? Demography and the Hypothesis of Parental Indifference.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33, no. 3 (2003): 421–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656538.