ABSTRACT
Before we embark on either description or explanation of the course of ‘child development’, let alone before we consider what efforts we might make to change its course, I must stress that neither ‘child’ nor ‘development’ could be said to be simple unproblematic concepts; in particular they are inextricable from beliefs about how to bring up children. There are many variations between cultures on what they believe children ‘naturally’ are and how they should behave (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 1983). There are also historical changes within societies. The study of the history of western childhood is only just beginning and its picture is controversial. Philippe Ariès’ pioneering study (Ariès 1962) argued that strong concern and affection for children, and a belief that childhood was an intrinsically valuable period, were historically recent developments associated with the rise of the affluent household in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Previously, he claimed, there was no concept of ‘childhood’: children were regarded with indifference by their parents or as inferior miniature adults to be strictly reared and severely punished. De Mause (1976) put forward an even blacker model of maltreatment and cruelty to children – infanticide, beatings, sexual abuse and a casual acceptance of high mortality through infection, accident or childrearing practices such as wet-nursing or using opiates to quieten a crying child. Ariès and De Mause have both been accused of selecting their data without much concern for their representativeness, and of interpreting dubious ‘facts’ in unjustified ways
(Pollock 1983; Houlbrooke 1984). As more evidence is examined, the picture of what was happening to the ‘crowds and crowds of little children [who] are strangely absent from the written record’ (Laslett 1971) becomes clearer and more complex. Houlbrooke (1984, p. 155-6) summarizes the relationships between parents and young children (in the English family between 1450 and 1700) in a picture which resembles what emerges from the mainly nineteenth century diaries reviewed by Pollock (1983) and the autobiographies from a later period collected by Burnett (1982).
