ABSTRACT
The stages of life provide an important frame of reference for the construction of age distinctions in the moral weeklies. Conceptualizing life as a circle of birth, growth, decay and death realigns the first and last stages of life. The images of health and illness construe childhood as a deviation from physical and corporeal perfection. Childhood is thus seen through the perspective of the adult, as a distinct memory. Its quality does not consist in itself, but in its otherness to adulthood which will, later in life, assert the adult’s presence in contrast to a memorable past. The concern with childhood thus also forges the constitutive memories on which adulthood can feed and against which it can define itself. The moral weeklies situate their distinction of childhood and old age in two conceptual frames of the stages of life, one circular, one teleological. The progressive stage-of-life models play an important role for the constitution of identities.
