Conclusion: Childhoods from past toward future

Here’s an important and tantalizing debate, applying to childhood the kind of discussion that models of modernity have provoked in other aspects of contemporary life. For many children still in the labor force, rather than primarily focused on schooling, key experiences resemble what children in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan encountered a century or a century and a half ago. Traditional family economies are eroding, if only because of rapid urbanization and the incapability of rural families to provide. In this context, a good bit of children’s work becomes novel, even though the fact of child labor is not; and this sometimes involves increased exploitation and new vulnerabilities. Many girls in India or Africa are today working as domestic servants in the cities, just as in Paris or New York in the 1850s; some are also sexually exploited on the job, as in the West before. Street trades, begging, and petty crime draw many children, as in Charles Dickens’ London. In the West and Japan, of course, conditions later changed, after this long and often painful transition; the modern model came largely to predominate even for most children in the lower classes, though it brought its own problems. Will further economic development and protective legislation, including pressures by global standards, move the poorer children of India or East Africa, or their descendants, into the more standard model over the next decades (as the very recent trends of child labor curtailment suggest)? Or are local traditions or permanent economic inequalities, often worsened by the new effects of disease and war, going to sustain a durable division in childhood around the globe, not only by social class, but also by region? Pulling together the strands of a global history of childhood is no easy

task. This book emphasizes three major versions of childhood: hunting and gathering, agricultural, and modern. Childhood, in this argument, depends first and foremost on economic systems – and this is still true today, amid schooling and consumerism (children trained as consumers are vital to sustain this particular system). However, cultures and family structures enter in, which is why there is no one traditional agricultural childhood and, in addition to economic variables, no single modern childhood either. There are, nevertheless, two basic questions that spring from the world

history of childhood, particularly the modern history, as we think about where childhood may head in the future. Does what we’ve called the modern model of childhood, embellished by

growing consumerism, describe the near future of childhood around the world, with an increasing number of societies moving closer to the model, while other societies extend its implications? (Another way to put this question: should we expect the frameworks of childhood to become more similar from one region to another over the next few decades?) And question number 2: should we want this to happen? Recent history, in its diverse implications for childhood, certainly compli-

cates any predictive effort. Depending on place and social class, we have seen growing numbers of older children sold into what amounts to sexual slavery. From Africa, the most common image of children seems to involve their presence in refugee camps, fleeing ethnic or religious conflict, sometimes maimed in the process, with the bloated stomachs and empty eyes of the starving; or, in southern Africa, lying on beds as AIDS victims, the disease contracted from parents at birth. Contrast this with the overbooked teenagers in the suburbs of the United States or Western Europe, cramming for exams that will determine college entrance, the day apart from school parceled out among so many activities that it will take some later years, in early adulthood, to regain a sense of spontaneity. Or, with overloaded, fashion-conscious California-style “valley girls,” or Japanese teenagers trying to figure out the latest must-have good. Or, in yet another place, with the older children volunteering as suicide bombers, with the encouragement not only of local militants, but often of proud parents as well. It seems impossible to fix on a single pattern of childhood. There is the contemporary reality of child soldiers, not only in Africa but in

parts of Southeast Asia, armed with weapons more deadly than children have ever possessed before. Reality, in this case, is complicated by the fact that, as we have seen, child soldiers used to form a significant part of many armies. While global outrage at use of child soldiers may be quite appropriate, particularly in light of the guns involved, it also reflects some new standards. Quite recently, experts have begun to worry that huge gaps in economic

standards and political instability are jeopardizing one of the most precious parts of the modern model of childhood, the decline of death rates. During the 1990s, death rates worsened or stagnated in over a third of all subSaharan African countries, while in war-torn Iraq, 10 percent of all children were now dying before five years of age (double the 1990 rate). More generally, malnutrition and AIDS were the worst villains in the slowing of gains in terms of global averages. Current childhoods are deeply divided by values, by affluence or poverty,

by political chaos or relative stability. An anthropologist recently captured one aspect of diversity through the image of the fenced-in school, seemingly a common symbol of modern childhood virtually anywhere. But in Africa,

the fence is designed largely to help keep children out who want schooling, who see it as a key to their future, but for whom there are simply not enough places given the limited resources available. On the other hand, in the United States, the fence is partly intended to keep students in, who find school a boring trap, a site of bullying and social tension that seems unrelated to any meaningful future. The kaleidoscope of childhoods in the contemporary world offers almost

endless variety, with dramatically different sets of opportunities and sorrows. Yet without denying this aspect of reality, there is also a reality of some overriding trends. The trends may seem familiar, but they constitute real change for many of the societies involved, and they do largely point to the applicability of the modern model. There was no country, not even the most impoverished and disease-

afflicted, where infant and early child mortality had not continued to decline during the last third of the twentieth century, despite recent stagnation and valid new concerns. Sierra Leone, with the world’s worst rate in 1998, with 316 children per 1000 dying before age five, nevertheless had experienced a 20 percent drop since 1960, along with a doubling of female literacy and a 50 percent increase in male literacy between 1980 and 1995. The world’s poorest countries collectively, with 282 children per 1000 dying before age five in 1960, had seen rates drop to 172, while the world as a whole dropped from 193 to 86 – a truly astonishing rate of change by any historical standard. The rise in literacy rates, though less dramatic, showed similar movement, reflecting the increased presence of schooling in global childhoods. It was certainly appropriate to note the huge gaps between rich countries and poor, and the equally huge differences in childhood experience that these gaps reflected; but the directions of change were widely shared, at least into the early twenty-first century.