Forces of change and the modern model of childhood: Developments in the West, eighteenth century to 1914

Historians are cautious about generalization. They frequently prefer to tell stories that hint at wider patterns, rather than laying these patterns out explicitly, at risk of oversimplification. They also tend to be very placespecific, and get nervous about statements that cover too much geographical ground. World historians, while not necessarily quite so cautious as the rest of the breed, are understandably edgy about discussions that pay too much attention to the West, since one of their purposes is to rebalance historical understanding so that the West does not seem to be running the past. A major reason world historians were prone to attack what used to be called “the modernization model” was that it gave pride of place to the West and assumed (in its simplest versions) that the rest of the world would follow Western patterns, or that otherwise there was something deficient that had to be explained. Too much caution, however, on the modern world history of childhood

could seriously mislead; a dash of boldness works better. This chapter begins by sketching a modern model of childhood, lest the woods be lost for the trees. Four major changes separate characteristic modern childhood from childhood in agricultural societies. These patterns do not describe all of childhood, but they do entail several corollaries, regardless of specific place. Furthermore, the changes first occurred in Western Europe and the United States. Other societies have adopted the changes in part through copying the West, but also for independent reasons, beyond mere imitation. It is also true that some societies are still involved in the process of transition, so we’re talking about a modern model that remains dynamic, and about the possibility that some societies will reject the model or will modify it substantially. What’s claimed here, however, is not a simple version of some modernization of childhood. There were differences between the modern model as it worked out specifically in the West, which is the subject of this chapter, and the way it worked out, or is working out, elsewhere (and these comparisons emerge in the following chapters). Finally, while the modern model may also seem “good,” compared with

traditional conditions – which is another way of saying that most of us are

so accustomed to the modern model that we have trouble seeing value in alternatives – it will be very clear that the model entailed all sorts of disadvantages. Some of these were emerging in the West by the nineteenth century, some have become clearer since. Because the modern model involved serious change, it also provoked many anxieties, and some of these persist even where the patterns seem firmly established. Some societies are still debating whether to adopt the modern model, even apart from the specifically Western trappings, and this can be seen as quite reasonable. The modern model is not complicated in its essence, but its position in world history must not be oversimplified. It’s important to remember that the focus of this and subsequent chapters

enters into several real and complex debates about childhood, initially around the extent to which a modern version of childhood can be legitimately contrasted with a more traditional, agricultural model, and then around the related and complicated issue of the Western role in influencing other societies over the past two centuries. The modern-premodern contrast need not be complete – continuities will undoubtedly accompany change; and it is definitely not the same thing as a good-bad contrast. Western influence, based on its own initial development of new forms of childhood, never completely overshadowed distinctive features in other regions, and frequently Western power and exploitation ironically constrained much capacity to imitate, even on a limited basis. The debates are not simple. Modern childhood, as it began to emerge first in the West in the eighteenth-

nineteenth centuries, involves three fundamentals, which are inter-related. A fourth factor intertwined with the more basic shifts. Change one, the most essential, involves the conversion of childhood from work to schooling. The idea that children should begin to assist the family economy at a fairly young age, and then should be able to cover their own support and perhaps add resources to the family economy by their mid-to-late teens, had been a core element in agricultural societies. In the modern model, this now gave way to the notion that young children should not work at all, in favor of going to school; more gradually, this extended to the notion that even midteenagers should not work, again with schooling as the new substitute. This meant, as many parents quickly realized, that children turned from being on balance economic assets, to becoming absolute economic liabilities, which in turn required serious rethinking of the nature and purpose of childhood. All of this pushed well beyond the place schooling had gained in agricultural societies, even in Islam and Judaism. This, in turn, along with more general urbanization which complicated

care for children, encouraged the second element in the modern model: the decision to limit family size to unprecedentedly low levels. Agricultural families had usually sought five to seven children, but this birth rate was simply inappropriate for conditions in which children cost money for food, clothing, and even school expenses, without contributing labor in return.

Accomplishing lower birth rates was not always easy. Many societies went through difficult discussions about what methods were moral and feasible, and discussions still continue even in the United States. Adult adjustment could be difficult as well: if parenting became less important, at least quantitatively, how should family responsibilities be defined? But whatever the anxieties, the process of birth-rate reduction proved central to the modern model of childhood. The third basic transition in the modern model involved a dramatic reduction

of the infant death rate, from traditional levels in which 30-50 percent of all children born had died before age two. The relationship with birth rate changes was variable. In the West, birth rate reduction began first, which encouraged more concern about saving children who were born, which then spurred further birth control needs. In much of the rest of the world, infant death rates dropped first, often as a result of improved sanitation and public health measures, and this triggered an urgent need to cut the birth rate, in part to compensate. In Western Europe and North America, where the modern changes first

took shape, developments stretched over many decades. Schooling began to expand quite early, initially encouraged by the printing press and the rise of Protestant attention to the importance of being able to read the Bible. Learning gains also entered into the growth of manufacturing and technological change, with many manuals devoted to enhancing skills. These developments began to gain ground by the sixteenth century, but the process of change was gradual, and the real commitment to seeing childhood primarily in terms of schooling emerged only in the nineteenth century. Significant birth rate reductions occurred in some social groups by the later eighteenth century. Concern about infant mortality rose during the nineteenth century, but the full conversion awaited the turn-of-the-century decades. As they accelerated, these changes linked to a fourth factor, the increasing

interest of the nation state – itself a modern product, initially defined in the West – in direct encounters with childhood. Few links between states and childhood occurred during the agricultural centuries, with primary responsibility resting on families (usually extended families) with secondary support from religious bodies, particularly from the postclassical period onward. Beginning with the French Revolution, however, states began to enter the picture vigorously, though often amid some real agonizing over boundary lines between parental privileges and state interest. Modern governments wanted some voice over childhood to help improve health, to encourage adequate supplies of troops and workers; to assure political loyalty, mainly through guiding school curricula; and to protect against certain forms of abuse. Government contact with childhood involved the growing commitment to state-run, secular education above all. But child labor laws, public health measures, government-sponsored guidance to parents, and even

a willingness to seize children whose parents did not seem to be providing approved types of care all entered in as well. Here was a final source of fundamental alteration in the framework of childhood, and for adults dealing with children, that defines the modern approach. The basic modern changes brought additional adjustments in their wake,

whenever and wherever they occurred. Predictably, the desirable qualities of a child expanded to include specific attention to intelligence: schools and testing programs made it clear to parents that measurable intelligence was a Good Thing. Greater age-segregation of children followed from the modern model.

Most schools allocated children to classes, or to seat sections within classes, by age. Furthermore, with lower birth rates most children grew up with fewer siblings, which reduced crossover relationships and promoted greater interaction with same-age school peers. Age-grading could also affect the ways many adults came to think about children. By the twentieth century, first in the West but then more broadly, a large body of expertise developed about age-sequenced development patterns, including cognitive skills. This expertise built on and enforced (some critics would argue, exaggerated) age-specific patterns inside and outside schools. Adult-child relationships were affected by the modern model, though

various specific formulas could ensue. Schooling reduced parental control over children, obviously in favour of agents of the state. This could cause concern, particularly when schools were seen as representing social class, ethnic or religious values different from those of the family. On the other hand, adult contacts with younger children often increased for the simple reason that, with lower birth rates and with more schooling taking girls out of the home, there were fewer siblings available to oversee preschoolers. Either more parental (usually, maternal) care or some alternative, such as paid help or daycare, became essential. Finally, declining birth and death rates probably increased parental attachments (on average) to individual children. Parents cared deeply for children in agricultural societies, so it’s important not to exaggerate. But with fewer children overall, and with each young child far less likely to die, emotional investment in the individual child rose. Certainly, though this is an economic as well as an emotional statement, parental inclination to indulge children in low-birth-rate cohorts tends to increase, and evidence of this runs from the West from the late eighteenth century onward to the China of the early twenty-first century. The modern model of childhood had implications for gender, though these

were so radical that they were often long concealed. The objective need for gender distinctions among children declined. With children less assigned to work, with its normal gender links, and with reduced emphasis on motherhood for girls, at least in terms of numbers of children expected, the need to stress dramatically different orientations for boys and girls was modified. Further, girls and boys could do equally well in school, though this was not

realized immediately; indeed, girls might have an edge. Many societies long masked this change, arguing, for example, that girls and boys should study different subjects – no engineering for girls but lots of home economics; or even separate reading books, as in late nineteenth-century France, that would tell girls about their special family and supportive responsibilities. Or when girls and boys were plunged together, as in 1920s American coeducation, other devices, such as separate sports, distinctive clothing, even distinctive colors (it was at this point that American consumer culture introduced pink for girls, blue for boys) could emphasize how different the two sexes were in childhood. But the objective basis for all this weakened, and usually the gap in practice would ultimately narrow as well. Finally, the modern model on the whole created greater separations

between childhood and adulthood than had been true of agricultural society. Children no longer worked alongside their parents when work moved outside the home (with industrialization) and when children were in school. It became harder to see childhood in direct connection to the rest of life. Of course, schools were preparing for life, and many could perceive this; but the connections could be fairly abstract, and in point of fact most of the child’s day was now spent apart from the adult’s world – the “real world” as Americans revealingly came to call it. This separation could affect adult attitudes toward children, who might now seem privileged, and it could complicate children’s efforts to find meaning in their own lives, encouraging new kinds of stress and disorientation. This was the modern model: school, less death, fewer children in the

overall population and in individual families, with a number of further implications and consequences. It’s now time to see how this model first emerged in the West, and also very carefully to note some specifically Western baggage that came along with it, but was not essential to the modern model itself. The first element of the modern model, school rather than work, was

ultimately encouraged by the fact that children’s work was frequently replaced by machines with industrialization, and that some schooling began to be seen as essential for successful adulthood. But the formula was prepared, in the West, by some earlier cultural developments, taking shape in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that provided a new view of childhood in advance of the more obvious spurs to change. Indeed, the major alterations in childhood provide an intriguing example of cultures changing first, gradually spurring actual behavioral change that would be reinforced by more objective developments, such as mechanization. Two kinds of rethinking occurred. The Scientific Revolution and Enlight-

enment encouraged the growing belief among Western philosophers that children were not corrupted at birth, as Christian and particularly Protestant doctrines of original sin had insisted. Science showed both that old ideas could be discarded and that children could gain access to reason. John Locke

argued that children were blank slates at birth, open to learning and essentially good, or at least neutral, unless corrupted by outside influence. These ideas spread widely and encouraged a growing belief that childhood should be devoted to education. Fierce debates raged about this new view, with a strong minority of Protestants, particularly in the United States, still insisting on sinfulness at birth and the attendant need for strict, even punitive discipline. Gradually, however, over more than a century, a more moderate view shaped majority thinking. The second innovation involved emphasis on the strong emotional

ties that should unite a successful family, and particularly mothers with children. The emphasis on familial love was unprecedented. Pictures of respectable families began to feature more expressions of emotion. A corollary was increasingly public displays of grief at the death of children. Another intriguing corollary was a growing openness to the opinions of sons and daughters about marriage arrangements, and a willingness to call things off if an older child claimed he or she could not love the intended spouse; older children were gaining some new voice on the basis of emotional redefinitions. These intellectual developments linked to other changes in the West

during the eighteenth century. Naming practices changed: fewer rural families waited to name children until they had passed age two, and names were no longer reused if a child died. These shifts suggested the growing emotional attachment to children and a new belief in their individuality. In many parts of Europe, swaddling was abandoned in favor of letting infants move their limbs more freely. This increased the burdens of supervision but promoted more healthy development. New criticisms began to be directed at sending children to be wetnursed, though, as we have seen, the actual practice declined only slowly; reformers argued that mothers should take care of their own children and avoid the greater health risks associated with wetnursing. Parents were advised against using anger or fear to discipline children, though of course behavior changed gradually and incompletely. A new interest in purchases for children developed, associated with a desire to educate; books written specifically for children emerged for the first time. By the same token, there was a growing impulse to interfere with unstructured play, in favor of more uplifting recreations. Youth itself won new favor in principle, as adults increasingly tended to claim to be younger than they actually were, if they lied about their age at all. Yet certain rules for youth became more elaborate: increasing emphasis on careful manners, in respectable families, brought new efforts to control table habits and posture. This was a complex mixture of changes, and by no means pure gain for the children involved. The gradual conversions to the key features of modern childhood meant

that key changes, particularly with regard to child labor, were far from complete even by 1914. (Continuity in some patterns was one of the

arguments of the revisionists, who disputed Ariès’ sharp contrast between Western tradition and modernity.) As industrialization took hold, and cities grew, it was new misery, not basic transitions, that caught the eye of perceptive observers. Many working-class families had to put their children to work in dangerous factories – the experience of working was not novel, but the new setting was troubling. Not a few worker families, including cases involving unwed mothers sometimes impregnated by employers, had to send children to orphanages and foundling homes, where at best they were subjected to hard work and moralizing supervision, at worst abused. Many children lived on the street, not always abandoned but certainly subjected to precarious conditions; not a few fell into minor crime, of the sort described by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. However, without denying widespread horrors, these conditions were not, in the main, permanent. It was the shift toward schooling that would ultimately reshape childhood across the board. New attention to expanding and redefining educational systems developed

from the late eighteenth century onward. New secondary schools emerged for elite training, while governments began to take a somewhat more hesitant interest in mass primary education; a law encouraging but not requiring schools was passed in France in 1833. Northern American states moved faster, beginning to compel school enrollment in principle in the 1830s, though many children still attended only sporadically. Between the 1860s and 1880s actual attendance requirements became common in the Western world (though American states in the South followed suit only after 1900), and by the 1890s the vast majority of children were literate. More than requirements were involved, though this was one area where governments played a major role in promoting education as beneficial to the economy and modern citizenship alike. Schools, accordingly, emphasized the basic skills of literacy and numeracy along with strong doses of patriotic fervor. By the 1860s, peasant families in France began to acknowledge that some education was good for their sons, as selling agricultural products to wholesalers placed a new premium on literacy and numeracy; a bit later it made sense to send daughters as well, in hopes that they could take advantage of new job opportunities such as school teaching. Along with education came laws limiting child labor, though primarily in the factories; legislation was on the books throughout Western society by 1850, though effective inspections occurred more gradually. For decades, many children would both work and attend school, particularly in rural areas and in the working class; but the trend was clear, and the arguments for the conversion of childhood from labor to schooling were well established. Gradually, also, growing numbers of middle-and even lower-middle-class

parents began to send children to at least a year or two of secondary school. The American high school emerged by the 1840s; European countries introduced new secondary schools, alongside the elite units, later in the century to

service growing demand. Youth as well as childhood was being redefined, though at first primarily for the middle classes. Reduction of the birth rate spread through much of the nineteenth century

and beyond. Middle-class and, in the United States, landowning farmers led the way from as early as the 1790s. The working classes followed, mainly after 1870, as did peasants; secular regions, in countries such as France or Canada, changed more rapidly than religious ones. The process required rethinking what both childhood and parenthood involved, and it could be very disconcerting; the unreliability and unrespectability of birth control devices also complicated the process, and many families long relied primarily on sexual abstinence. By the early twentieth century, really large families nevertheless became unusual, particularly in the cities and among non-immigrant groups. It was true that migrants from rural areas, or emigrants from southern and eastern Europe, brought high birth rates still around 1900, but they began to adapt in their new settings, often quite quickly. The final piece of the modern puzzle, the reduction of the death rate,

occurred more abruptly in the West. Heightened grief and a growing tendency to blame parents, particularly mothers, for child death surfaced by the mid-nineteenth century, setting the stage for new practices but initially without much result. Women’s magazines, a new genre, blamed mothers for bad practices that caused children to die – such as overwrapping infants, and this reflected a new sense that traditional death rates should be prevented – but in fact they remained stubbornly high. Poor families, with still-high birth rates, indeed could depend on some deaths; an unskilled German worker wrote about how his overburdened wife paced their small apartment, muttering “if only they would die.” Increasing use of sanitary measures in childbirth, prenatal checkups, and urban centers designed to help supply milk and infant foods began to achieve dramatic results from 1880 onward; during the ensuing 40 years, on both sides of the Atlantic, infant mortality dropped from 25-30 percent to under 5 percent. (Declining use of wetnurses played into this development as well.) The modern conversion had been essentially completed, though further improvements would continue. With this, in turn, and despite continued regional and class differences, much of the modern model had been installed throughout Western society by the early twentieth century. These changes were accompanied by several other developments that were

not inconsistent, but reflected more strictly Western approaches to modern childhood – approaches that might or might not show up with the modern model in other parts of the world. Several of these accompaniments were interesting, not just in relationship to the basic movement toward the modern model, but also in their contrast with earlier Western traditions, including Christian beliefs and previous tensions about youth and work. Dramatic reconceptualization may have been necessary, at least in principle,

precisely because the modern trends strained against some of the distinctive patterns previously dominant in the West. A striking feature was the idealization of the child, building on eighteenth-

century intellectual currents. Children were portrayed, in middle-class literature, as wondrous innocents, full of love and deserving to be loved in turn. Pictures and stories disseminated the image. Motherhood gained new credit as a fundamental source of family love, but siblings were supposed to be joined in loving affection, and even fathers, though now working outside the home, might come in for a bit of joy. While many families doubtless took this new emphasis with a large grain of salt, diaries, and stories such as the American classic Little Women, showed how hard some families worked to make it reality. Anger should disappear, in this model, from the bosom of the family, though the new imagery almost welcomed grief. Actual family leisure, in the middle classes and among respectable artisans, built on the same feelings of togetherness. Pianos became vital furniture from the 1830s onward as a focus for family singing; and the idea of family vacations began to gain ground as well. The celebration of children’s birthdays, another new habit, expressed family affection and the commitment to children’s individuality. Loving innocence had other corollaries. Parental, and particularly mater-

nal, responsibilities increased, in protecting children from corruption as well as ill-health. Many women worked very hard to maintain a sunny disposition with their offspring. It became harder for children themselves, particularly girls, to express discontent in middle-class families – for discord should not trouble a loving home. By the 1860s, a new eating disorder began to be noted among a minority of girls, particularly middle-class girls. Modern anorexia nervosa, a rejection of food often prepared by doting mothers, might have been an indirect way to react to parental smothering that could not be explicitly faulted; the disease would gain further ground a bit later, when slender body standards became widely accepted as well. While boys had a little more latitude, allowed to engage in some rough play with friends and indeed encouraged not to become effeminate or, as a new word argued, “sissies,” they too faced a number of new rules, including the strictures of polite manners and careful body control. Sexuality was a real problem amid the larger imagery of loving innocence.

Middle-class children, particularly males, could not marry very young, because they needed to complete an education and get a start on their career before taking on family responsibility. At the same time, it was vitally important not to burden a family with too many children, and particularly, of course, with children born out of wedlock. A huge new concern about masturbation revealed the rising level of anxiety about sex and childhood, and it generated many very real disciplinary efforts as well. At an extreme, a few children were institutionalized for incorrigible masturbation, which was held to cause all sorts of health disorders and insanities. Children were

supposed to be attractive, and girls gained all sorts of training in the art of looking beautiful with an eye to encouraging male interest in courtship, now that marriage should in theory be based on love. New Western standards promoted a complex juggling act in which sex was frowned upon, but a certain amount of sexually laden flirtation was encouraged. Some children, and indeed some adults, found the combination confusing. Along with the emphasis on loving innocence and the complicated signals

about sexual restraint, the West introduced a final basic innovation into its approach to childhood in the nineteenth century: the idea of adolescence. The word came into some use from the 1830s onward, but it really began to gain currency when it was sanctioned by child psychologists such as the American G. Stanley Hall in the later nineteenth century. Adolescence denoted a specific slice of childhood that had never before been identified, having been subsumed in the more general category of “youth.” The concept, applied mainly to the middle class at this point, emerged from several of the key changes in the experience of and ideas about childhood. It denoted, first of all, the growing period of dependence for children who were now being sent to secondary schools rather than to work. Adolescence demarcated teenagers’ heightened distinction from adults. Adolescence also labeled a period of sexual maturation without respectable outlets for expression. Amid improved nutrition and the greater contacts and temptations of urban life, children in Western society began to experience puberty at an increasingly young age: whereas puberty at 16 was common in eighteenth-century America, the age had dropped at least two years by the 1860s. This very real change obviously complicated the task of sexual control on which middleclass standards depended so heavily, and adolescence helped express this tension. More broadly still, adolescence denoted a period of emotional turmoil for many children, helping parents understand why, despite a loving upbringing, relationships might become more difficult for a few years. The concept of adolescence fueled a wider social change which, however,

had its own double-edged qualities. Because they were so different from adults, and because of the hope to preserve or restore childish innocence, deviant adolescents needed distinctive treatment by police officers and courts of law; they should not, as offenders, be thrown in with adult criminals. Throughout Western society, reformers introduced new codes of juvenile justice by the later nineteenth century, with separate courts and separate penal institutions – the reform schools. At the same time, however, laws governing youth behavior tightened up quite dramatically. Behaviors such as vandalism, that had been tolerated in more traditional times when people had confidence that youth would not unduly challenge community norms, now became illegal in the more anonymous context of growing cities. So, of course, did open sexual activity, and the treatment of female juvenile offenders became particularly severe. Great effort was devoted also to outlawing drinking and, for several decades, cigarette smoking among adolescents.

It became harder for many older children to measure up to social requirements. A variety of new institutions, such as the scouting movement, sprang up to help youth move through its difficult transitions without falling into unwholesome or illegal alternatives. At the same time, often-exaggerated fears about increases in juvenile crime marked the ambiguities with which Western society regarded adolescence in the nineteenth century and beyond. Some of the tensions in the new approaches to childhood, and the new

situations of children themselves, were further shaped by social class and gender factors. Respectable middle-class people might hope to keep their own adolescents in check, but they had no confidence in the immigrants or the working classes. Belief in the inadequacy of many parents grew as the definition of responsible parenthood became more rigorous. Class differences help explain the reliance on policing and a number of other efforts at intervention against working-class parents, including moralistic supervision of particularly vulnerable groups such as unwed mothers. Working-class youth did develop recreational interests – for example, in the new amusement parks – that the middle class frowned upon, and premarital sexual activity might be tolerated in working-class culture as well, so long as pregnancy was followed by marriage. Early in the nineteenth century, in fact, an increase in the rate of illegitimate births among teenagers and young adults helped spur new levels of middle-class vigilance. Clashes over respectability in children expressed the combination of middle-class standards and deep social divisions in nineteenth-century Western society. Gender presented another divide. Girls and boys were held to be very

different, and they were destined for different roles – wife and mother versus productive worker or businessman. While the new imagery emphasized the loving innocence of all children (unless corrupted by debased parents), girls were particularly innocent, held to be by nature anger-free and far less burdened than adolescent boys with sexual desire. These standards imposed severe constraints on girls, though many measured up successfully; failure, particularly in the sexual arena, was severely sanctioned. Respectable boys faced their own complexity. They were supposed to be gentle in the household but capable of forceful action outside. They should honor sexual restraints in courtship (though there were some breakdowns here, even in the middle class), but they should also realize that men were by nature sexual aggressors. Some late-adolescent schoolboys could reduce this particular tension by sexual liaisons with lower-class girls or prostitutes, enjoying a sexual double standard compared with middle-class girls. Highly gendered childhood was another legacy of the particular Western take on modern childhood more generally. While its hold would decline in the twentieth century, it continued to influence the West itself, and also Western judgments about childhood in other societies. Nineteenth-century Western society accompanied the creation of the modern

model of childhood with a series of embellishments that simultaneously placed

almost impossible hopes in childhood and generated a number of new restrictions and constraints. The most obvious strictures were directed against children of the less respectable classes, where a combination of new laws and moralistic laments were designed to keep the lid on, while explaining why childish innocence could not readily be preserved. But the standards applied to middle-class children themselves were demanding as well. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud basically argued that the new standards distorted children’s natural impulses and created frustrated, even mentally ill, adults. More generally, the concept of adolescence was meant to explain a problem period without throwing out the idealization of childhood. Not all of these features were essential to the demographic transition and the embrace of schooling, though they seemed vital at the time. Some would drop off in the twentieth century, as the modern model itself matured. Many would be ignored or modified by other societies seeking their own transitions to modern childhood – though the weight of Western authority and insistence made it difficult to distinguish what was non-essential.