ABSTRACT
If ‘childhood is very much an issue of our time’ (James et al., 5), then mass media have contributed considerably to creating and proliferating images of childhood, making them part of our cultural identity. Philippe Ariès’s seminal study L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime has raised awareness that concepts of childhood are contingent on socio-historical developments. The link between shifting perceptions of childhood and evolving family structures has also informed histories of the family, such as lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, randolph Trumbach’s The Rise of the Egalitarian Family or Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family.1 The strong focus of these studies on the eighteenth century pays tribute to Ariès’s proclamation of a ‘discovery’ of childhood after the latter part of the seventeenth century, which prepared the hidden master-plot of the great narrative that the childhood concept of Western European societies is largely a matter of modern, middle-class, capitalist ideologies.
