ABSTRACT
Historians of family and childhood have been at the forefront of pushing the emotions history as a research agenda. They have drawn attention to the historicity of emotional norms and practices related to childhood and the family, showing how these have varied over time as well as across cultures. This chapter presents two diverse cases and draws on the work of key scholars in the field to introduce some of the central motifs, questions, and concepts in the modern emotional history of childhood and the family. The first case explores the ambiguous politics of European missionaries’ love for children in colonial South India; the second examines young people's emotional experience of their parents’ divorces in late twentieth century Denmark.
