ABSTRACT
Children have always been with us. But, it is now argued, the notion of the child as distinct from the adult, of childhood as a definite stage, with its own special characteristics and dynamics, is of late appearance, coming into Western consciousness somewhere near the end of the eighteenth century and flowering in the nineteenth. The glaring omission of children in traditional history is well captured by Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost. Such omission by historians, of course, accords well with the individual repression of childhood memories, a cardinal tenet of Freudian psychology. Childhood history differs from family history in its concentration parent-child relations and its desire to see those relations mainly from the point of view of the child. Yet the difference of central focus and perspective needs constantly to be remembered. Attention to the child in the terms the authors have indicated seems to have arisen strongly as a result of romanticism.
