ABSTRACT
There has been no more contentious debate within the history of children and youth than that regarding the relationship between parents and children. When French historian Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood first appeared in English in 1962, it catapulted social history to new levels by its sweeping historical claims, while opening the doors for decades of vociferous debates about the meaning of parenting practices, children's roles, and conceptions of childhood, or lack thereof, in different historical and societal contexts. The two key areas of contention concern whether the relationships between parents and children in the modern world have substantively differed from those in the medieval era, particularly in reference to the understanding of childhood as a specific category of human experience, and whether there has been a significant change in the quality of parent–child relationships, especially in regard to the emotional intensity of the parent–child bond.
