Heywood - A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times

Introduction

My name is Etienne Bertin, but Ive always been called Tiennon. I was born in October 1823, at a farm in the Commune of Agonges, near Bourbon-lArchambault. My father was a mtayer on the farm in partnership with his elder brother, my uncle Antoine, called Toinot.

So began The Life of a Simple Man (1904), in the world of a sharecropping family in the Bourbonnais region of France during the early nineteenth century. Its first few chapters gave a vivid account of the ups and downs of childhood in this milieu. The author, a sharecropper himself, acknowledged that there was nothing remarkable in this poor, monotonous life of a peasant. Yet he was determined that his novel would show the gentlemen of Moulins and Paris and elsewhere what the life of a mtayer really is. Drawing on the reminiscences of his grandfathers, he recounted his experiences as a child of family feuds, his work as a shepherd boy, the Spartan meals, the nightmares, and a visit to a fair, catechism with the local priest and the double wedding of his brothers.

Yet this fascination with the childhood years is a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as one can tell from the sources available. During the Middle Ages there was no question of peasants or craftsmen recording their life stories, and even accounts of the highborn or the saintly did not usually show much interest in the early years. A St Augustine (354430) or an Abbot Guibert of Nogent ( c .10531125) might give some details of their childhood experiences, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule.

For the medievalist James A. Schultz, this change in perspective is easily explained. His contention is that for approximately 2,000 years, from antiquity down to the eighteenth century, children in the West were merely thought of as imperfect adults. As they were considered deficient, and entirely subordinate to adults, he reasoned that their stage of life was likely to be of little interest for its own sake to medieval writers. Only in comparatively recent times has there been a feeling that children are special as well as different, and hence worth studying in their own right.

Yet, even in the twentieth century, old ways of thinking about childhood died hard. In addition there remained the lingering feeling that childhood was a natural phenomenon, which could hold little of interest for researchers. The temptation was for members of any society to consider their own particular arrangements for childhood as natural, having been steeped in them all their lives. At the same time, it was easy to assume that the biological immaturity of children would be the overriding influence on this stage of life.

Such ways of thinking about childhood and children have barely survived the last few years. In 1990 the sociologists Alan Prout and Allison James argued that a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood was emerging, based on six key features. In 1998 they (together with Chris Jenks) returned to the fray with another paradigm, this one revolving around four sociological approaches. Given the slippery nature of the customer, they wisely presented it as necessarily a matter of interpretation, inviting engagement and simultaneously forbidding closure. The second strand to the new paradigm is that childhood is a variable of social analysis, to be considered in conjunction with others such as the famous triad of class, gender and ethnicity. In other words, an age category such as childhood can hardly be explored without reference to other forms of social differentiation which cut across it. A middle-class childhood will differ from a working-class one, boys are unlikely to be raised in the same way as girls, the experiences of the young in an Irish Catholic family will diverge from those in a German Protestant one, and so on. The novelist Frank McCourt understood this all too well:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

The third contention is that children must be seen as active in determining their own lives and the lives of those around them. A key weakness of the earlier neo-behaviourist emphasis on socialization was, arguably, its reduction of children to passive receptacles of adult teaching. Recent research in the social sciences indicates that it is misleading to allocate parents the role of model and children the role of followers. As Dreitzel notes, beginning with the first smile or the first cry, parents react to their childs behaviour and respond with warmth or hostility, encouragement and satisfaction depending on their childs character no less than on their own attitudes. Relations between adults and children can instead be depicted as a form of interaction, with the young having their own culture or succession of cultures.

This new line of thinking on children and childhood raises problems of its own, as its exponents readily acknowledge. If childhood is to be seen as a social construction, what role is there left for biological influences? How can one discover general insights into childhood when the emphasis is on the plurality of social constructs: at the extreme, on what is unique to each society rather than what is common to all? Accepting that other societies will have conceptions of childhood different from our own, how do we react to practices such as infanticide and child prostitution, which we would judge abusive? Is there not a danger, as Diana Gittins observes, of dismissing real problems, real pain, real suffering of real embodied people? And in focusing on the language and lore of children, or the tribal child, is there not a risk of casting the young into a ghetto on the margins of society? Even so, the new paradigm in the social sciences has both influenced and been influenced by historical writing about childhood to good effect.