ABSTRACT
Childhood experienced major changes in the advanced industrial societies during the twentieth century. Two patterns predominated, and of course they interacted. First, societies in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe continued more fully to implement what we have described as the characteristics of modern childhood. That is, they added commitments to schooling, and further reduced at least the more traditional forms of child labor; they completed the dramatic reduction of child death rates that had begun in the late nineteenth century; and, with a few zigzags, they made a fuller conversion to low birth rates (Japan joined this particular parade mainly after World War II, with government encouragement, at first relying heavily on abortion before turning to other forms of birth control). There were real changes involved in the fuller implementation, even though the principles had been established earlier. But second, the advanced industrial societies also innovated further in the
treatment of children, reconsidering traditional methods of discipline and adding growing interest – and anxiety – in treating children as consumers. The United States introduced changes in these areas as early as the 1920s. In Western Europe, the more dramatic shifts – generally speaking in the same directions – occurred from the late 1950s onward. The role of government in organizing childhood expanded further as well,
beyond previous staples such as requiring/providing education and regulating labor. Two somewhat clashing approaches were involved, both aimed in principle at making childhood better and protecting children even further. Many governments passed new protective measures in the decades after World War II. American states required children to wear helmets when bicycling, and safety stipulations for riding in automobiles escalated steadily. The Italian government sought to regulate the age at which children could ride elevators alone. Many governments, by the early twenty-first century, sought to intervene against childhood obesity. Efforts to control the commercial fare directed at children formed another large category, toward limiting access to undue violence or pornography in the media. Continuing earlier “child-saving” efforts, many governments discussed situations in
which the state should take children from presumably inadequate parents, not only in cases of abusive violence, but where there seemed to be excessive alcohol or drug use or even, again by the twenty-first century, lack of control over excessive eating. Not all the regulations were thoroughly enforced, and children and adults alike found ways around some of them. But the belief in government oversight of childhood extended fairly consistently. At the same time, however, post-World War II rhetoric also talked about children’s rights as a category of human rights more generally. Much of this discussion focused on developing countries, where attempts to defend children against excessive work to assure them opportunities for schooling seemed particularly urgent. The human rights efforts might also apply to freedom from abuse even in the West, or, more tentatively, to freedoms of expression against overzealous censorship programs in schools. In dealing with social change more generally, in places such as the United
States and Western Europe, some scholars used terms like “postindustrial” or “postmodern,” suggesting dramatic shifts away from the industrial patterns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eye-catching labels like this may have captured some important changes, such as the shift toward more white-collar jobs and the relative decline of factory work, but for childhood their usefulness is questionable. Most of the world, after all, was still just moving into the industrial age. Even for the industrial pioneers, many of the developments in defining modern childhood increased; new efforts – for example, the widening safety regulations – sought to limit child death still further. Even some of the clearer innovations, such as the expansion of children’s consumerism, in part reflected parental responses to the lower birth rates, seeking to demonstrate to the one to three children per average family how much they were cherished. The new elements were important, but they operated within ongoing adjustments to the earlier, more basic changes. Of course, the claim can and should be debated, but there seems to be no reason to use terms suggesting that the modern model was being unseated by some brand new postmodern variant. For the West, specifically, some observers, finally, have found in recent
history an “end to childhood,” as children are exposed to more and more adult-level consumer items, and the idealization of childhood innocence fades a bit. Changes in the lives of women, taking shape from the 1950s onward, toward more work outside the home even when children were young, also cut into the childrearing patterns so romanticized during previous decades. It’s important to remember, however, that childhood innocence was itself a fairly new idea, not a traditional notion; and it had surfaced mainly in the West, in part in reaction to older ideas such as original sin. The disappearance of childhood innocence, in other words, was not a clearly global development. Even in the West, however, some notions of innocence, and certainly of protectiveness, still lingered, at least for children before adolescence. And in point of fact, studies by the early
twenty-first century showed that working mothers spent more time actually with their children (as opposed to being in the same vicinity) than their housewife counterparts had done in the 1950s. Without question, changing conditions did prompt some significant
rethinking. In the process of change beyond the trinity of schooling, low birth rates, and low mortality, Western societies modified some of the emphases that had characterized their approach to childhood during the nineteenth century, apart from the basic modern model. Manners became more flexible; by the 1940s, parental injunctions about posture were being abandoned. Other issues, including a more informal style suitable for consumerism, were becoming more important. Sexual concerns remained, particularly in the United States, but both culture and practice shifted toward greater permissiveness. The intense concern about respectability, as against the lower classes or immigrants, yielded amid these changes also, without disappearing entirely. Images of cute and loving children actually intensified – they proved very effective in advertisements for relevant products, or as movie fare – but they became more complicated; and attention to adolescence, an innovation in the nineteenth century, became a recurrent, anxiety-drenched obsession with many adults. Differences persisted within the advanced industrial category. Western
Europe and Japan, for example, placed much more emphasis on competitive examinations, to track students into different levels of secondary education, as well as, later on, to determine university eligibility, than did the United States. This meant, in turn, that many children were subjected to greater school pressures during their early years than was generally true in the United States. At the later end of childhood, American universities normally charged tuition fees, often substantial fees, whereas Japan and Western Europe supported most schools with tax revenues, offering essentially free rides for most students who qualified for entry: here was a huge difference for youth, but also for definitions of family responsibility. Children’s consumerism went farther, faster in the United States and (by the late twentieth century) Japan than in Western Europe, though there were certainly similar trends. Diets varied. Between 1950 and 2004, European children, as they grew, gained rapidly in height – the Dutch became the tallest people, on average, in the world. But American children registered fewer gains, possibly because of new sources of immigration and greater social inequality, but probably also because of a diet richer in junk foods that deterred height gains. Dramatic differences opened in childcare after the 1950s, despite common
concerns such as encouraging children’s performance in school. In Western Europe and the United States, more and more mothers began to take jobs outside the home. This raised obvious issues about caring for children, though everywhere women expressed initial discomfort at their new roles, claiming, even as they went to work, that mothers really should stay home.
In Western Europe, daycare centers became increasingly common, and most parents became comfortable with this recourse. In the United States, anxieties about care were greater, as many mothers preferred to rely on relatives or patchwork solutions rather than commit their children to institutional care. Finally, in Japan, fewer mothers worked, preserving a much more direct role in tending young children and indulging them as a reward for diligence in school. In all three regions, of course, differences were leavened by a common pattern of falling birth rates (aside from a brief baby boom), which confined the problem to some extent. It is important also to remember the differential impact of events. Children
in West European countries such as Germany and France suffered greatly during World War I, because of constraints on food and living standards as well as the absence and often the loss of fathers; the experience would be repeated even more widely in World War II. Children in the United States, though affected, experienced much less disruption. Bombing scarred children, literally and psychologically, in Western Europe and Japan during World War II. American children experienced a brief period of anxiety as the nuclear arms race developed during the 1950s, as part of the growing Cold War. And some analysts have argued that deeper fears of devastation lurked amid adolescents even after Americans largely seemed to cast off apocalyptic concerns in favor of growing consumerism by the late 1950s. But certainly American children never faced the literal confrontation with modern war that affected at least two generations of their counterparts in Western Europe, and one major generation in Japan. Social and gender differences also continued to matter, in addition
to geography. Working-class kids were fully drawn into schooling by the 1920s, as attendance laws began to be fully enforced. But they remained less likely to complete high school or go to college than their middle-class counterparts, which meant that their adolescence was different as well. For a minority of children, particularly in societies such as the United States, where the welfare state did not fully develop, deep poverty and malnutrition persisted; by the 1980s in the United States, the number of children below the poverty line began to expand rapidly, particularly in households headed by single mothers – the twin result of reduced government attention and disrupted family life. Racial minorities – expanding in Europe as a result of new immigration after World War II, as well as the United States – also provided distinctive contexts for childhood, reacting to prejudice and less abundant job opportunities, and frequently forming separate gangs and musical styles. While gender arguably declined in importance, it still affected the types of education chosen, dress and other consumer options, and household duties. Certain kinds of gender distinctions occasionally expanded, as in the United States during the 1920s, when pink and blue were chosen to identify gender in young children, and when largely separate extracurricular activities were emphasized to highlight masculinity or femininity.
