ABSTRACT
"Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood," wrote Philippe Ariès in his well-known Centuries of Childhood. Obsessions may be too strong a word, but certainly concern is not new. Plato and Aristotle debated the subject of children at length. This chapter explores some of the themes in the development of thinking about children and childhood from the early modern age to the present, not as fixed paradigms of childhood reflecting specific interests, but as a set of interrelated themes, each composed of residual, dominant, and emergent elements. Certain elements appear, disappear, and reappear over time—yesterday's residual elements may become dominant tomorrow to be succeeded by new, emergent elements and so on. The author shall describe the variations and explain why they changed over time.
