The History of Childhood Since the "Invention of Childhood": Some Issues in the Eighties

Abstract

One approach to the history of childhood examines change in private dispositions toward the young. Another approach concentrates on the proliferation of public institutions for managing child life. The history of sentiments has led to a futile debate over the relative extent of dispositional change or continuity in feeling for children without considering the ways in which notionally primordial or elemental dispositions were constructed or contaminated by the norma tive, politicized meanings of childhood The upshot is that the symbolic politics of childhood, arising from intergroup moral conflict, returns to haunt current interpretations in the guise of timeless psychological or bio-social truths. Study of the official processing of children errs in the opposite direction, losing sight of the personal thought and action of children and their parents, as if their historical experiences were fundamentally comprised of policy and administration. Actual children vanish and an implausibly intrusive account is offered of policy itself. Family history, especially accounts of agrarian and working class family strategies, helps put each history of childhood in a more realistic context and may bridge the two.