NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Teaching the History of Childhood
Steven Mintz, Columbia University

It would be hard to imagine a subject more difficult to teach—or more rewarding—than the history of childhood.  Truly interdisciplinary, the history of childhood must necessarily draw upon anthropology, art history, biology, demography, developmental psychology, law, literature, philosophy, and sociology, among other disciplines.  Unlike courses that can be organized in a purely chronological fashion, the history of childhood’s multidisciplinary character means that courses must combine chronology with topical approaches--including such topics children’s culture, diversity and inequality, children and war, friendship and peer relationships, and biological realities and cultural variation-- and ongoing debates, such as how much childhood has changed over time and how extensively children’s developmental stages have varied. Public policy is another key aspect of any course on the history of childhood, looking at the shifting ways that adults have sought to protect, punish, and educate children. Adoption, child abuse and neglect, children’s rights, disability, juvenile delinquency, orphanhood, schooling, and welfare policies are among the public policy topics that our courses address.

Because childhood is not a unitary subject, but varies by age, class, gender, ethnicity, and many other variables, courses on the subject necessarily emphasize diversity. More than any other subject I can think of, evidentiary issues are central to courses on the history of childhood. Such courses almost invariably deal with the way that children have been represented in art, film, and literature; with material culture and the artifacts of childhood; with the challenges of recovering children’s voices, especially through autobiographies and memoirs. And in addition, perhaps more than any other field, this subject must speak to contemporary controversies: Whether, for example, childhood is disappearing, whether children’s well-being is declining, and whether the commercialization and colonization of children’s culture and the proliferation of new technologies are fundamentally altering the experience of childhood in negative ways.

Historians of childhood bring to their classes a distinctive disciplinary gift: We see the world dynamically, diachronically, and longitudinally, and therefore are in a unique position to assess the losses, gains, and tradeoffs that have accompanied historical change.  We know something that many other disciplines tend to downplay or ignore: That our definition of childhood, our anxiety and paranoia about children, our obsession with our own kids and neglect of others, our confusion of our convenience with children’s needs—all are products of history, and are, therefore, changeable.  We are the scholars best positioned to answer certain crucial questions, such as whether there are "natural" stages of human development, or at least in part these are the products of society and culture and history?

Course Paradigms
In examining history of childhood syllabi available on the H-Childhood website (http://www.h-net.org/~child/syllabi/) or elsewhere on the Internet, it becomes clear that instructors have embraced a number of competing paradigms or organizing principles. There is a model that rests on intellectual history, periodizing the history of childhood in terms of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Darwinism, and Freudianism.  There is a modernization model, which divides childhood into distinct eras, pre-modern, modern, post-modern, or pre-industrial, proto-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial. There are courses that wrestle with the Aries paradigm, whether the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought a newfound emotional attachment, imaginative investment, and philosophical interest in the child.  There are paradigms resting on implicit assumptions of progress or conversely on declension, that the history of childhood is marked by the increasing ability of children to enjoy a childhood as a time of play and schooling and an increase in children’s autonomy and agency, or, alternatively, by the regimentation of children’s lives and juvenilization of children and the prolongation of dependence.  Then, there are paradigms that chart the history of childhood in terms of shifting cultural ideals, for example, of the rise and fall of an ideal of a sheltered or protected childhood, or of shifting social contexts, such as growing age consciousness and the emergence of new institutional contexts.

The themes of agency, conflict, negotiation, and social control offer key organizing principles in a growing number of courses.  According to this paradigm, the history of childhood is best understood in terms of conflict, such as the conflict between adult efforts to domesticate and rationalize children’s lives and children’s attempts to assert their autonomy and distinctive identity.

What makes courses in the history of childhood especially exciting is that the field is a work in progress. In contrast to more settled fields, courses in the history of childhood are much more open-ended.  They adopt a bi- or tri- focal perspective,” looking at children’s lives and subjective experience, childhood as a crucial cultural symbol, and the ways that adults have represented, imagined, taught, cared for, worked, and thought about children.  These courses look at the mechanisms of education, discipline, regulation, and sorting, and at childhood memories and at childhood’s legacies.  Most courses that I am familiar with also incorporate a problem-oriented approach, looking at such topics as domestic violence, delinquency, disability, and a host of other trans-historical issues.

The Missing Link
The history of childhood was twice born.  During the 1960s and 1970s, the history of childhood was inextricably bound up with psychohistory. Some of the field’s most provocative and stimulating works were a product of this formative stage, which was heavily influenced by anthropology’s culture and personality school.  But as psychohistory came to be regarded as excessively reductionistic, the history of childhood was reinvented.  Rather than focusing on the adult consequences of childhood socialization and experience, the history of childhood emphasized more concrete, but also somewhat narrower, questions, for example, how adult-child dynamics and representations and discourses of childhood have varied over time or how approaches to childrearing and child protection and the contexts of childhood and children’s play and culture have shifted over time.

Much was gained through this emphasis on more focused questions.  We accumulated a wealth of information about the lives of diverse children.  But something has also been lost, since many of the issues that preoccupy our students and the general public are of a more speculative nature.  For example, is the recent spate of school shootings an anomaly or a warning sign?  Is imaginative, self-initiated, improvisational play disappearing from the lives of over-scheduled and over-protected 21st century kids, and, if so, is this having damaging consequences for their creativity, social skills, and resourcefulness? Are violent, sexist videogames isolating and desensitizing children? Are the Internet and new media eroding childhood innocence at too early an age? Are aggressive marketers distorting children’s body image and material aspirations? Are a heightened stress on early academic achievement and a test-drive school curriculum taking the play out of childhood?

Courses on the history of childhood offer us a chance to engage questions like these—and to bring our students into the conversation.  Childhood is a crucial missing link between the social and cultural, on the one hand, and the emotional, and psychological, on the other, between culture and personality, between the state and the family, between the public and private spheres. It is through the history of childhood that we can study the process of cultural transmission, and understand how children have been a “cultural avant-garde,” playing a crucial role in the adaptation and transformation of cultural values and sensibilities.  Childhood is also the key vehicle through which the class order is reproduced and that gender and ethnic identities are constructed. In the United States, childhood has been central to the development and evolution of the welfare state.  And further, “modern” childhood and the consumer economy grew up hand-in-hand, and contemporary economic developments, such as privatization, the rise of the “new” economy, and the communication and technological revolution of our time carry vast consequences for children’s lives.

Too many of our colleagues view the history of childhood as a rather marginal and overly sentimental and atheoretical field of study.  But I would maintain that the history of childhood offers a crucial vantage point from which we can reintegrate the biological and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts.  The history of childhood also provides a way we can underscore history’s relevance. Even those who know no history make implicit assumptions about historical change, and almost every contemporary public controversy about young people has a little known historical dimension, such as whether the transition to adulthood has grown more disjunctive and problematic or whether youth violence is or is not increasing or whether we have entered an unprecedented new stage in the commercialization of childhood. Finally, the history of childhood offers a window onto key substantive and theoretical issues, such as the shifting mechanisms of social control and the growing importance of discursive control or how thinking about dyslexia and autism has altered over time.

Unlike many aspects of history, the public is genuinely interested in, indeed, anxious about, childhood. Yet in the public mind, the history of childhood begins and ends with a single question, when was childhood invented?  The public thinks it knows everything it needs to know about our field when it imagines that children in the past were miniature adults. Larger questions—about shifting age relations or the rise of the inward turning, emotionally intense, child-centered family—are ignored.  We have an opportunity, in our classes, to model a truly interdisciplinary approach to learning, and to demonstrate concretely that far from being simply of antiquarian interest, history offers fresh perspectives on biology, psychology, and contemporary social problems.