ABSTRACT
In her Century of the Child first published in Swedish in 1900, Ellen Key announced that the future would be different and better. With the old baggage of religion tossed aside, modern young men and women could embrace the “holiness of generation,” committing themselves to conceiving, birthing, and rearing new generations of children whose promise would be unclouded by conflict or neglect. 1 She was wrong on several counts. The twentieth century was not to be the century of the child, but rather of world war, totalitarian rule, and genocide. And the religious baggage Key gleefully scuttled was not inimical to the child, but rather a tradition uniquely characterized by pro-child attitudes and assumptions. This essay considers the biblical roots of that pro-child outlook, the development in both Judaism and Christianity of prochild beliefs and institutions in the first five centuries of the Common Era, and the continued impact of those late-ancient models in Western Europe up to about 1500.
